A Morning After is a Delicate Affair: UNINTENTION
by hakojo
Summary: After returning to Section 9 as an independent contractor, the Major is assigned a mission to guard the Prime Minister in the wake of an incursion by an unknown hacker. However, the case spirals into something much more sinister...    Post SSS. f/f
1. Chapter 1

(A/N: This is my first time writing fanfic in a very, very long while, so please review and tell me what I'm doing wrong!

Also, I don't own GitS:SAC or any of the associated characters, blah blah blah.)

別れの朝は微妙な情勢 (A Morning After is a Delicate Affair); UNINTENTION

It was odd, I thought to myself as I walked down the familiar hallway; one would think that, as large as this building was, forty people and their support staff could work here comfortably. To be honest, though, I'd always found it cozy enough with eight of us – now it just seemed too crowded. I'd passed three new faces just on my way up from the garage, a trip I'd usually always been able to make without seeing anyone except perhaps an operator taking a message to one of the departments downstairs.

What made it more jarring was the fact that I didn't know any of these people who were now crowding my building. I could line up the faces with their appropriate names, of course, not to mention a whole host of other data besides, but that told me very little. I had no idea how to use them– no idea whom to put at the front of an offensive team or who would be better off at the back. If I needed information from a particular source, I didn't know whom I could send to get it, or who had connections in what places, or who would be able to procure me what, how quickly, from where, and at what cost. It made me uneasy, being surrounded by a whole team of unknown quantities and possible liabilities. It was why I didn't physically come into the building much anymore - one of the benefits of being an independent contractor again was that I usually wasn't expected to.

Still, no matter how long I'd been away or what position I held now that I was back, a summons from the chief was a summons from the chief.

I knocked sharply on the office door.

"Enter."

I pushed the door open. He sat behind his desk with the same impatient expression he always wore, the expression I'd been expecting to see even though I'd come five minutes earlier than I was asked.

I hadn't expected to see the room's other occupant, who was seated with perfect composure on the rich leather sofa, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

I bent slightly at the waist. "Prime Minister."

She smiled graciously. "It's nice to see you again."

The smile didn't quite hide the lines around her eyes; she seemed to have acquired several new ones since I'd last seen her in person.

I noticed then that there was another woman, oddly colorless and wearing a nondescript beige suit, standing just behind the sofa, eyes pointed politely at the floor. She looked irritatingly familiar, although apparently she wasn't important enough to merit an introduction.

I turned my attention back to the chief.

"You wanted to see me?"

"Indirectly," he said. "Madam Prime Minister, if you'd please explain."

She nodded.

"First of all, I'd like to apologize for putting you to all this trouble. But just a few days ago, during a routine scan of my security personnel, a virus was discovered in their shared external memory. We don't know how it got there or where it came from, unfortunately, but the function of the virus, as it was explained to me, was to create a backdoor in the military attack barrier that each of them had installed, probably to enable a future hack by a currently unknown party.

"For security's sake I've given control of the investigation into the origin of the virus to Section 9. It's bad enough that this breach occurred in the first place – I don't want word of it getting out through some leak in the ranks of the police. Also, it's likely that this virus was planted in preparation for some terrorist attack on my person. In light of this, Chief Aramaki has agreed to provide me with some extra personal protection for the time being."

Well, it was easy to see where this was headed.

The chief turned back to me and cleared his throat.

"Because of your independent status, I've merely recommended you for this assignment – whether or not you accept it is entirely your decision. Still, I thought I'd give you first choice before handing it to someone else."

I thought it over. On one hand, it was legitimate work, something that I could definitely stand more of, plus this was a job that I'd be perfectly justified in charging extra for, with additional hazard pay. On the other hand, guard duty was by nature dull and confining and generally stressed the limits of my tolerance.

"Would I be working as part of your existing security detail, madam?" I said, turning to the Prime Minister.

"No," she replied. "Because this threat is so unorthodox, I think it would be best for you to be able to operate free of existing security protocol. I'll leave the strategic decisions up to you; all I would ask is that you try to stay beneath the radar as much as is possible. Really, I'd rather that no one even knew you were there."

That sounded marginally better. And it wasn't like I had anything else coming up.

"It's an indefinite assignment; I'd have to bill weekly on this one. For twice my usual rate as well."

"That's fine," said the chief at once, without so much as blinking. I was surprised – it had been an outrageous bid, even from me.

His piercing gaze locked onto me briefly. He had his own reasons for wanting me to take the job.

"All right," I said. "When do I begin?"

"I'd like you to report to my office tomorrow morning," said the Prime Minister, visibly pleased. "Unless you need more time to prepare…?"

"No," I said.

"Excellent. In that case, I'll see you at eight."

The colorless woman in the beige suit, whom I'd nearly forgotten about, drew a tablet out from her jacket pocket and made a quick note.

"Prime Minister," she said quietly as she tucked the tablet away again, "your meeting with the Minister of Home Affairs is scheduled to begin in half an hour."

There was an odd, halting quality to her speech. I suddenly realized why she looked so familiar.

"Thank you, Mari," said the Prime Minister. She stood in one smooth motion and turned to the chief.

"If you'll excuse me."

"Of course," he said.

I watched as she left the office, walking briskly with her little assistant close behind her. Once they were out of sight, I turned around.

"Another bioroid?"

"Yes," said the chief. "They're going into service as personal assistants in many of the higher government offices, although due to their cost of production and maintenance needs it's unlikely that they'll ever replace the operators entirely."

"I see. Anyway," I said, settling myself into the chair closest to his desk, "it's nice to know that some things never change. She still keeps you on a short rope, huh?"

He cleared his throat briefly, brushing the comment aside.

"The fact of the matter is that the situation is far more serious than the Prime Minister would like to admit. She hasn't said this to me directly, of course, but she's made it clear that she thinks it's possible whoever's behind this attack is working from inside the government itself."

"That's a bit paranoid of her, isn't it?" I said. "If it was someone on the inside who planted the virus, why would they just leave it out in the open where it would be detected and purged? Even members of parliament have their own links to military sources – I can't imagine that anyone would be so careless as to try to spread a virus around without encoding it properly, or at least checking the dates when security inspections would be held. It's like they wanted it to be found."

The chief nodded. "Precisely. The whole situation is extremely unusual; at the very least, we're up against someone who's capable of hacking his way into the shared memory of the Prime Minister's security staff, and at the most, it could be an attempt on her life engineered by someone with full military backing."

"Business as usual, then, I suppose," I said. "Still…wouldn't it be more efficient to send a three-man team over to handle this? Close combat, long range, and then one of Ishikawa's disciples to handle the communications end of things?"

"Under normal circumstances that's probably how I would have done it as well. However, I wanted to give you this assignment for two reasons:

"First, to be honest, at this point I have very little idea where this situation is headed. It could be nothing, or it could jump right to the worst-case scenario. I need someone who can keep an eye out in all the right directions in addition to being able to handle whatever comes up as it happens. Also, if it turns out that we need to make the Prime Minister disappear for a while, you're the only one who's equipped to do so securely without having to make arrangements in advance.

"Second, you've worked closely with the Prime Minister before. I know it's been a couple of years now, but she's familiar with you and she knows she can trust you. Even if it turns out that all of this is merely an overreaction and whatever terrorist threat may have been present was neutralized the moment the virus was discovered, I think the Prime Minister will be less likely to let her paranoia get the better of her and do something foolish if she has someone nearby from whom she feels she can take advice."

I nodded. "And third," I said, "you've barely had anything for me to do since I came back, and you don't want me to feel left out. Go ahead and say it – I won't get offended, I promise."

The chief's eyes narrowed.

"I expect you to report back to us with anything you observe that may help the investigation into the virus. Now, you've got some prep work to do – you're dismissed."

"Right. See you."

I got up and left the office, shutting the door a little more harshly than I'd meant to on the way.

I saw two more unfamiliar faces on my way back down to the garage. They had been talking animatedly up until they noticed me, at which point they fell silent and waited for me to pass. I had long since grown used to this, and I kept walking. I was already perusing the initial report that had been made on the virus, trying to get a feel for what exactly I was up against.

_You know, it wouldn't have killed you to stop in and say hello while you're here._

I directed my attention to the cybercomm channel as I stepped into the elevator.

_Why Ishikawa, I'd never have thought you were so sentimental. I just assumed you were busy and that'd I'd be intruding._

_Of course I'm busy. But if it's you I've sure as hell got a minute._

_I don't, unfortunately. I'm on my way out the door again – there are a few things I need to take care of before I head out to the Prime Minister's residence._

_Yeah, I heard about that. I'm a bit surprised you took the job, though. It's not exactly in the same vein as everything else we've given you..._

_ Is there anything else you can tell me about this virus? Any idea who wrote it or why it was planted yet?_

There was a brief pause in the transmission.

_Well, we just finished the structural analysis, and I have to say, the construction of the thing doesn't look like something your average amateur would write. It's more along the lines of what you see in military protocol, although if this _is_ military, their quality control standards have changed a lot since I was contracting there._

_I see. So it's possible that this is an inside job after all?_

_That's the funny thing. You'd think that given how it was discovered, it'd be easy to track it back to someone – after all, if you're dumb enough to put a virus into a shared memory space where it's almost guaranteed to be found, you're probably dumb enough to leave a trail - but we don't have a single lead so far. I've got a few of the guys on it, so hopefully we'll turn up something in a few days._

_All right. By the way, is Batou still out in Nagasaki with Togusa?_

_Yes._

_When he gets back, tell him that I want him and Saito on standby in case I need backup._

_He'll be happy to hear that. I'll pass it along._

_Thanks._

I terminated the conversation, unlocked my car, and sank into the driver's seat. As I started the engine I began compiling a list of preparations that needed to be made – fortunately, most of them could be taken care of en route to Fukuoka, such as preparing emergency bolt holes and letting certain contacts know that if anyone came asking for me in such-and-such a way, they were to be told that I was currently unavailable. Usually I was able to balance the work I got from Section 9 with my other commitments, but I had a feeling that this job would require more of my undivided attention than the others I'd taken on.

I edged carefully out of the garage and onto the entrance ramp. Even the parking deck was crowded now.

How stupid of me, to get hung up on something so trivial.

I turned sharply out onto the street, neatly skirting an oncoming delivery van. For now it was back home to pick up my I.D., which I was usually encouraged not to carry when on an assignment, and my dress uniform, which I thought I might never have to wear again. Everything else I would need – firearms, camouflage, my arsenal of cyberbrain devices – I kept with me as a matter of habit.

In a way, it was nice to be packing up for a mission again. These days I was carrying out most of my investigations solely on the 'net – it would be good to move around a little and get a change of scenery.

Except for the part where the scenery was a collection of offices and the only movement I'd be doing would be following the Prime Minister's shoulder.

Maybe I should have turned down the job after all.


	2. Chapter 2

It was nearly four in the afternoon. I was leaning against the wall of the Prime Minister's office, continually cycling through interfaces that linked me to the security cameras around the perimeter. So far the area was clear, as it had been for the last two weeks. Three days ago I'd tagged a man who had come to deliver a shipment of printer paper and tracked his progress throughout the building, but he had done his job and left. The contents of his delivery had checked out as well. In all, nothing to worry about.

The Prime Minister herself was bent over a stack of papers, scribbling voluminous notes in the margins with a red pen - for some reason she seemed to prefer doing her editing on physical media instead of digitally. She had been at it for the last hour and a half without any break in her concentration whatsoever, steadily moving through page after page.

The Prime Minister's level of devotion to her work was impressive, even to me. She had absolutely no life of her own, aside from getting up at six every morning to go run laps outside, regardless of the weather. She was in her office by seven-thirty at the latest, and usually didn't end up going to bed until ten or eleven at night, although somehow she always managed to maintain her focused, energetic attitude, no matter the time of day. Her professionalism bordered on mania – I had a feeling that, quite apart from wanting to perform her duties to the best of her abilities for the sake of the office itself, she was terrified of drawing any criticism that could be at all avoided.

At any rate, she was doing a wonderful job of not acting like someone who thought that a currently unknown party within her administration wanted her dead.

She sighed and set her pen down.

"Major Kusanagi?"

I stepped forward and turned off my optical camouflage.

"Yes, ma'am?"

She had taken to requesting a status report every day around this time – she said it was because this was generally the quietest part of her day, and it was unlikely that someone would come in and happen to see me. I would rather have conducted the whole thing via cybercomm, but apparently every transmission that went through the Prime Minister's head was recorded and screened by her security people, and since it would have raised several awkward questions had I been found diving the security database to erase our conversations, especially considering their heightened state of alert, it was actually less bothersome for me to just speak to her physically.

"Well?" she said, in more of a politely expectant tone than a snappish one.

"Nothing to report," I replied. "The perimeter has been secure for the last twenty-four hours, and I haven't observed any unusual behavior in any area staff members so far."

"Thank you," she said. "Have you found any new information on where the original virus might have come from?"

Last week, Ishikawa had sent us a report saying that his crew had found a half-buried link back from the shared memory of the Prime Minister's security to a military office in Niihama, but so far none of them had had any luck tracking down a single person who might've been the one initially responsible for the thing. They were still at it, and I was keeping my eyes and ears open for any leads.

"I haven't. If anything turns up, I'll let you know at once."

"All right. Stay on your guard."

"Yes, ma'am."

I waited to re-engage my camouflage. There was a vital part of this routine that she hadn't completed yet.

"By the way…" she said, after the usual pause, "I'm sorry to put you through all this…I'm sure you must have better things to do than spend your time tailing me…"

Well, as long as we were both clear on that.

I'd very politely explained to her during my first day that she really didn't need to keep apologizing to me – I was being paid quite handsomely to watch her back, after all. Even though she'd agreed at the time (with another apology for having apologized in the first place), she had done it again the very next day, and I had grudgingly accepted it as just another one of her diplomatic reflexes.

"It's not a problem, ma'am," I said, and then switched on my camouflage again.

And honestly, when I thought back to some of the other people of importance I'd wound up protecting during the course of my career, I'd dealt with worse. Though the involuntary courtesy could be annoying, it was so much easier to work with someone who actually followed my instructions as opposed to fearlessly ignoring the advice they'd solicited from me in the first place. Not only had the Prime Minister gone along with my more basic requests that she cut back her public appearances and avoid large, open crowds, she had even agreed to give me open access to her field of vision, in case I happened to see something through her eyes that I might miss with my own. Anything that would help me, she'd said. While she knew that I'd unhesitatingly protect her from a physical attack with my own body, if it came to that, she, unlike most of my former charges, seemed to want to avoid that sort of scenario in the first place. It was a wonderful change.

Unfortunately, even the most accommodating of principals couldn't make up for the fact that this assignment was severely testing the limits of my sanity. Even though I'd practically grown up with military strictness and rigidity, two years of working entirely on my own initiative had been more than enough to erase every last bit of my tolerance for it; after spending so long with, for the first time I could really remember, the freedom to work on whatever I wanted, however I wanted, whenever I felt like it, having to stand in one place, devoting myself to monitoring the same security feeds for hours on end, was killing me. And while on some level I recognized that it was probably good for me not to let myself get too used to one method of operation over another, it didn't make the work any more enjoyable.

Shifting the camera interface to one side of my field of vision, I pulled up the Prime Minister's agenda for the day. She had two meetings scheduled for this evening, one practically right on top of the other. The first, which was due to start in another hour and a half, was just a regular meeting of the cabinet, and the second was a policy discussion with some of the bureau heads under the Ministry of Defense, which would take place in their offices, halfway across the city.

I had initially thought that the Prime Minister's frequent trips by car to nearby parts of the country could make my job rather difficult, but apparently Mari, her bioroid secretary and the only other person who knew I was there, also did her driving, so it was no trouble at all for me to sneak along.

The Prime Minister kept to her editing until half an hour before the cabinet session was due to start, at which point she gathered up her papers and laid them aside in a neat stack, along with a note reminding herself what still needed to be done with them. A few minutes of rummaging in one of her desk drawers produced another packet of papers, which she sorted through momentarily, presumably to make sure they contained everything she needed, and then tucked into a folder. She stood slowly, let out a heavy sigh, and then strode out into the hallway. She still had twenty minutes to spare, and it would take her less than ten minutes to reach the meeting room, but it was her habit to show up earlier than everyone else, in an attempt to better assert her power over the room.

It didn't make any difference to me; standing in a room somewhere watching security footage was standing in a room somewhere watching security footage.

I moved silently through the carpeted hallways, staying only a few steps behind the Prime Minister. I had put aside the camera data again in order to keep a better lookout – a nice view of what was happening at the front gate wasn't going to do me much good if someone decided to burst through the window with a knife in hand. Fortunately, we made it to the meeting room without incident. I took up my post in the corner opposite the door, and the Prime Minister began sorting and laying out her papers, mumbling to herself all the while. After about five minutes the rest of the cabinet began to trickle in, and once everyone was accounted for, the meeting began. I tuned out most of the actual discussion, as I was only allowing myself time for about an hour of sleep per week, and right now I had a job to do.

Once the meeting was over, the Prime Minister had to dash, quite literally, back up to her office to exchange papers. Mari was there waiting – she'd arranged all of the necessary documents already, plus she had the Prime Minister's raincoat folded neatly over her arm.

"Thank you," said the Prime Minister gratefully, tucking the stack of folders into her bag. She ran a hand lightly over her hair.

"Am I holding up all right?"

"You look fine, Prime Minister."

I could see why the Prime Minister had become so fond of Mari; not only was she efficient and compatible with just about everything, but being a bioroid and therefore not subject to bad days, she was basically a walking, talking self esteem boost, something the Prime Minister, with her manic desire to project the outward appearance of perfection at all times, could certainly do with.

We hurried down a few hallways and a flight of stairs to the front entrance, where Mari had brought the car around. It was raining steadily, and in her haste to get to her next engagement, the Prime Minister slipped and tumbled backward on the wet sandstone pavement. I automatically threw out an arm to catch her.

"Goodness, I can't even walk properly, can I?" she said distractedly. "Thank you."

She settled herself in the back seat of the car. I sat down next to her and pulled the door closed, and off we went. Mari had also graciously allowed me the use of her eyesight when I needed it, and between the three of us I was able to keep something resembling a proper lookout. The security detail following in the car behind us could handle anything to the rear: they were expendable.

We were nearly halfway to the Ministry office complex when a transmission flashed into my cyberbrain.

_Hey, Major. Holding up all right so far?_

I switched the channel over to voice-only, still concentrating on my video feeds.

_And where have _you_ been, Batou? I didn't think the Nagasaki case would take that long…._

_Sorry about that – it kind of started to go in circles after a while, and it didn't help that the new Home Affairs minister kept fighting us every step of the way over jurisdiction. But we collared the guy in the end, which is what matters. Anyway, Ishikawa says you've been hijacked._

_In a manner of speaking._

_Fun. Also, I got your message. The chief says he'll try to keep me and Saito free for you, but if something comes up, we'll have to bail._

I'd forgotten; it wasn't _my _team anymore.

_Understood. It doesn't look like I'll be needing you anytime soon anyway – I've had two whole weeks of staring at office walls waiting for something to happen._

_Isn't that a good thing?_

_I suppose._

_Oh, by the way, Ishikawa's crew managed to dig a little farther back along the path of that virus – he wanted me to let you know._

_Oh? Anything conclusive?_

_Well, it looks like it originated from the office block in Fukuoka operated by the Ministry of Defense, and then was patched through a police station into that office in Niihama. No trace of who made it, and most of the staff there have checked out okay – right now they're focusing on any connections the Defense Ministry may have had with another source who could have ordered a hit on the Prime Minister._

I sat up a little straighter.

_Did you say the external offices of the Ministry of Defense in Fukuoka?_

_Yeah, what's up?_

_I'm on my way over there right now. Policy discussion._

_Think it's a setup?_

_Could be. Our ETA's only fifteen minutes – that's not much time to prepare for anything._

_You want I should at least take the chopper and be ready in case something happens?_

_If you don't mind. You probably won't be able to make it out here in time on such short notice, but it wouldn't hurt. I have a safehouse nearby where we can hole up if worst comes to worst – if that happens, I'll let you know and the chief can tell you where I am._

_Roger._

The transmission ended.

"Prime Minister," I said, without turning around.

"Yes?"

Her field of vision had shifted due to her instinctual urge to look at people when she spoke to them.

"Turn your head again. I was just sent some new information about the source of the virus – it came out of the building we're headed to right now."

"So you think this could be some kind of ambush?"

"It's possible."

She sighed in a resigned sort of way.

"What do we do?"

"You don't do anything. I'm going to be right next to you, and if something happens, keep low and leave it to me and the other security team, assuming they're not in on it as well. Otherwise, just stay calm."

"All right," she said. This time there was a noticeable quaver to her voice. It probably hadn't helped that I'd forgotten my formality in my enthusiasm at the prospect of actually having something to do and started issuing orders.

"It's likely that nothing _will_ happen, ma'am," I said, in an attempt to repair some of the damage. "Still, I've found that it never hurts to be cautious."

"I understand," she said. She didn't sound entirely convinced.

It was strange – I hadn't remembered her spooking quite this easily during the incident two years ago. I supposed, though, that it was different when it was your own administration that could be trying to kill you.

I had Mari relay the new information back to the security people following us, along with a request that they stay on heightened alert for any sign of a possible threat. I only hoped that no one had gotten to them first; if there was a situation, it would be much easier to handle it with five people instead of just by myself. Either way I'd probably end up blowing my cover, but better that than the alternative.

The Prime Minister seemed to have calmed down some by the time she entered the building – she responded warmly enough to the greetings of the bureau heads, and when she sat down and began to lay out her documents, she was her usual image of professional composure. I stood at her shoulder, my eyes darting around the room, lingering on one spot only long enough to confirm that there was nothing there to worry about. The minutes seemed to stretch into hours – even if this wasn't a conspiracy involving the entire department, it was entirely possible that there was someone here who was only waiting to take advantage of the Prime Minister's presence to succeed where their plan with the virus had failed. The only question was how long it would take for them to show up.

_How are things on your end so far?_

_Nothing yet. And you?_

_Still on the way – we'll be there in about half an hour._

_All right. By the way, I'm not officially here, so stay out of sight until there's trouble._

_Got it._

I felt a bit better knowing that I at least had some of my own people nearby.

Still, as the discussion dragged on, nothing turned into more nothing. Although there seemed to be more than a bit of ill will going around the table, most of it, as far as I could tell, was related to the issues at hand and didn't extend very far beyond that. Then, finally, the Prime Minister collected her papers, exchanged a few more formalities with the room at large, and left. I stayed close behind her, feeling more than a little annoyed.

_Well, that was a whole lot of nothing._

I tried not to snarl in my response.

_I know. And you didn't see anything?_

_Nope. All clear._

_Still, at least now we can figure that this didn't go through the department itself – it's more likely that someone used one of the defense barrier programmers here and then had them try to route the virus so as to make it harder to trace._

_Makes sense. I don't suppose you've got anything that could point us to a suspect…_

_Well, we could start by running down the list of all of the lobbyists and special-interest representatives that the Prime Minister has managed to make herself unpopular with._

_Ugh. I got you._

I opened up another channel.

_Ishikawa, dive the com logs from the building – flag anything that's not official correspondence and start sifting through it. I'll be surprised if there isn't still a trace in there. If we can figure out who's behind this, we'll be able to know for sure if there's still an active threat._

_Roger that. I'll get the guys on it._

I was ordering again, although this time, at least, it was in the direction of people who would do what I said without thinking about it anyway.

_Well, that's it for now. I'll call you again if I need you._

_Make sure you actually need me next time, all right?_

_I'll try._

I assumed that, given how late it was when we finally returned, the Prime Minister would just call it a night and go get some rest; instead, she went back up to her office and put in another good hour and a half of work, and it was nearly eleven thirty when she finally decided to retire for the night.

"I appreciate your efforts regarding the situation this evening." she said, as I followed her through the now empty hallways back to her apartments.

I allowed her some time to add in a reprimand before modestly deflecting the complement. I wasn't entirely sure what else to say; in my past experience, dignitaries only ever said things like that when the inconvenience I'd caused them had actually paid off.

"Really," she continued "I can't tell you how much better I feel just knowing you're keeping a lookout. Keep up the excellent work."

"…Yes, madam. Thank you."

She smiled, then said goodnight and disappeared into her rooms. I took up my post just outside the door, called up my camera feeds, and began looping through them again.

What an odd woman I was looking after.


	3. Chapter 3

It had now been three and a half weeks with no sign of any apparent hostility toward the Prime Minister.

The trail on the virus that had started all this to begin with had gone cold again as well. There was nothing incriminating in the com logs from the offices of the Ministry of Defense, even the official transmissions.

At the end of this week, I planned to ask the Prime Minister exactly how much longer she wanted me around.

I recognized that a lot of my displeasure with this job was due to the almost polar differences between it and how I'd been used to functioning, and I tried not to be too bitter about that. What was specifically bothering me now, though, was that I, a highly specialized independent contractor, had been hired (at no small expense) for a job that had apparently demanded my particular talents, only to spend the better part of a month doing absolutely nothing. It wouldn't have been such a problem had I been working for the government full-time again; if I wasn't wasting my time here, I would have been wasting it somewhere else anyway, either on standby back at headquarters, or working some menial case or other. Nor would I have begrudged the Prime Minister the extra help, had it seemed like she actually needed it.

As things stood now, though, I was wholly unnecessary. And when I thought of all the other, more productive (and, needless to say, more interesting) things I could be doing, well, it made me a little frustrated.

It was late evening, and as usual, the Prime Minister was hard at work. She looked miserable – she'd been in something of a mood lately, probably due to looming budget decisions, and it wasn't unusual for her to snap if asked to explain something more than once, only to apologize profusely a few seconds later. Much to my amusement, her staff all seemed to be quite used to this.

There was a sharp knock on the office door.

"Come in," said the Prime Minister, without looking up. My eyes immediately flicked toward the door.

It was Mari, with an armload of thick envelopes.

"These just arrived for you, Prime Minister," she said, setting the stack down on a bare corner of the desk.

"Hmm?"

The Prime Minister lifted the first envelope and turned it over to read the label.

"Oh! Excellent – I've been waiting for this to come in. Thank you."

Probably something else to do with the budget issues, although whatever it was, it must have been important to have been shipped on paper instead of sent electronically.

Mari hadn't turned around to leave yet, but that was nothing unusual. She was probably just waiting for the Prime Minister to look up again in order to ask her something.

Her hand shifted behind her back.

I'd never seen a bioroid feel compelled to fidget like that before.

Her arm twitched, and the hand came into view again.

In it was a gun with a silencer attached to the muzzle.

The arm arced upward, bringing the weapon into position. The Prime Minister still had her head down – she was focused on leafing through the packet of papers that had been in the envelope she'd just been handed.

Everything seemed to move in slow motion.

My natural instincts kicked in after only a few microseconds, although it felt like days.

"GET DOWN!"

I surged forward. A corner of the Prime Minister's desk was in my way; I slid across it, scattering papers in all directions, launching myself bodily against Mari. She fired just as I pushed her to the floor, and the bullet shattered one of the overhead lighting fixtures. I grabbed her gun arm and twisted it until I felt it break – I wasn't taking any chances.

Once she was disarmed, I forced Mari's head upright and drew a cable out of the dummy barrier at my waist, then plugged it into the back of her neck. This had to be a hack, and I would have to be fast if I wanted to find out who was controlling her.

However, as if to confirm my suspicions, the connection whited out almost immediately. Mari's body went limp, and a shower of sparks issued from the port I'd been using. I lifted her head up – her eyes were blank, and white blood was leaking from the corners of her mouth.

Too late.

I picked up the gun and tucked it into my belt, then went to check on the Prime Minister. She was curled up underneath her desk with her knees pulled up to her forehead. I knelt down to help her up.

"Are you all right?"

She nodded. Her fingers were tight on my arms, and I could feel her trembling.

"I…Thank you…"

The office door banged open, admitting at least a dozen security personnel. Of course, someone would have heard the gunshot, or at least the light breaking. The one at the head of the group looked from Mari, sprawled on the floor, to the Prime Minister, visibly shaken, to me. The situation was almost cinematically awkward. I stepped forward.

"Mari just tried to kill the Prime Minister under the influence of a hack, probably instigated by the same person who tried to infect all of you with that virus. The scene here is secure, and Section 9 will handle the immediate investigation. What you all need to do now is see if the perpetrator is still in the area. And you might want to hurry."

I could appreciate their confusion – it must have seemed as though I'd stepped out of thin air.

"It's all right," said the Prime Minister, after another moment of stunned silence. "Go."

The team leader nodded, and the security detail turned and jogged out into the hallway. Once they were gone, I opened up a cybercomm channel.

_Chief, it's me. The Prime Minister's assistant just came after her with a gun. She was hacked – whoever did it burned out her brain before I could trace them._

_What?_

_Could you send someone over to pick up the body so we can get her over to the crime lab? I still have the weapon, too – I have a feeling there won't be prints on it, but you never know._

_Of course. And the Prime Minister?_

_She's fine, if not still a bit startled. I think it's obvious now that this is an inside job – they'd've needed a barrier key from the programmers at the Defense Ministry to get into Mari's brain._

_Hmm. Could it also be that this is the work of an exceptionally talented hacker who's completely unaffiliated with any government agency?_

_There's only one of _me_, and I'm pretty sure I'm not to blame for this. Besides, the original virus didn't look like the work of an amateur, not to mention that anyone without regular access to this building would have had a hell of a time slipping Mari a gun in the first place._

_Well, we'll see if the crime lab turns up anything. In the meantime, whatever security precautions you've been taking, double them._

_Roger._

I closed the channel. The Prime Minister was picking up and re-sorting the papers I'd knocked off of her desk while trying her hardest not to look at Mari. Her hands were still shaking. I felt like I should do something, and rather self-consciously got down to help her.

"Thank you," she said again.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yes, I…"

She paused for a moment. She was holding her papers so tightly I thought she'd rip them. I reached forward and laid a hand on her forearm.

"You should go get some sleep. You'll feel better."

I'd slipped up and forgotten whom I was speaking to again, but it didn't seem to bother her. If anything, my decided informality was actually helping to calm her down.

"You're right," she said. "I believe I will. I just want to get all of this picked up so I'm not coming into a messy office tomorrow…"

She continued methodically stacking and laying aside the scattered documents.

"So…what should I do about…?"

Her eyes flicked uncomfortably in the direction of Mari's body.

"Well, I talked to the chief, and he's sending someone to take her back to our lab for analysis – there could still be something in her brain that we can use to find out who did this. They might even be able to restore her for you afterward, depending on how bad the damage is."

"I see…"

She looked uneasy.

"Mari had no idea what she was doing," I murmured.

"Oh, of course," said the Prime Minister. "It's just…"

She trailed off again uncertainly. After a moment or two, she cleared her throat and set the last stack of papers back on her desk.

"Well, that's that finished. Now, I'm off to bed – I've had far too much excitement for one night…"

I nodded, and as usual, followed closely behind her as she made her way back to her little section of the building. I was still visible, and I was attracting more attention than I'd've liked from the security people stationed at regular intervals throughout the hallways.

"By the way, don't worry about keeping your camouflage on all the time anymore," said the Prime Minister, in a tone that suggested she'd been musing on the subject for a while. "Everyone's going to know you're here anyway and… I think I'd rather have you where I can see you as well."

_Just_ what I wanted to hear.

"Yes, madam."

"Well, good night," she said, and headed down the corridor that ran the length of the residential wing. When she closed the door behind her, I heard it lock. That was unusual.

I'd planned to get a couple of hours of sleep myself that night, but I wasn't going to leave the Prime Minister unprotected after what had just happened. Instead, I stayed at my post by the door, running through my security feeds, occasionally answering questions from the full time security people as to who I was and what I was doing there. Word of my presence must have spread, because eventually they stopped asking and defaulted to staring.

How original.

I stood guard at the door until the Prime Minister came through it again at about six the next morning. She looked as if she hadn't slept well – there were dark circles under her eyes, and the lines around them seemed deeper than ever. Still, she went outside to run, as she always did, although this time she stayed within the walls of the grounds as opposed to going out on the sidewalk. I wasn't complaining, since it was much easier to keep an eye on her there.

Once the Prime Minister had finished her run, she went back to her rooms to dress for the day, and I slipped away for a few minutes to change quickly into my formal uniform. As far removed as I'd been from this kind of atmosphere, I figured that being visible all the time still went along with being presentable, and that my skintight camouflage, however practical it was, was not appropriate under these circumstances. The Prime Minister didn't seem at all surprised to see me in uniform when I fell into step behind her as she went up to her office – I supposed that, since she'd never seen me in anything else back when I was with Section 9 full time, I'd simply reverted to normal for her.

I spent the morning in my usual spot, leaning against the rear wall of the Prime Minister's office with a clear view of the door. I didn't have to keep scrolling through cameras anymore; now that we had verified an actual threat and the security staff knew that I was here, they'd been ordered to let me know about any suspicious activity in the area. They had also been told to follow any instructions I gave them regarding additional security precautions, although I hadn't yet had to issue any. They were doing the human shield thing just fine on their own already; I had nothing more to suggest.

"Any news?" said the Prime Minister at about eleven. I was surprised she'd managed to hold out so long before asking me that.

"Nothing to report, ma'am," I replied. "I'll let you know."

"Thank you," she said briefly, and then returned to whatever she was working on. She sounded just as tired and upset as she looked, and I could hear her pen fairly ripping into the paper as she scribbled frantically.

As frustrated as I'd been with this job back when nothing was happening, now that something _had_ happened, it seemed to have become about a hundred times worse. Putting up with the Prime Minister's neurotic tendencies was difficult enough when she was in a good mood; as things stood now, with the person who was the closest thing she'd had to a friend having tried to kill her, the girl who was filling in as her personal assistant making a hash of her extremely complex filing system, and a yearly budget proposal that still needed to come together, I was finding it extremely difficult not to grab the Prime Minister by the shoulders and shake her. I did try to be sympathetic; if anyone knew about stress in the workplace, it was me. However, I also knew that you never let the stress dominate your life like that, especially to the point where you became insufferable to the people around you. And it wasn't exactly like she was new at this, either.

Although, I mused, it was probably much easier to behave that way as a matter of course if you were the Prime Minister of Japan – what was anyone going to do about it, discipline you?

Things didn't improve over the next few days, either; if anything, the longer we went without any sign of trouble, the more nervous the Prime Minister became. To her credit, she wasn't taking her frustration out on everyone else quite as much, although as an alternative she'd become very quiet and withdrawn, speaking only when directly spoken to and then usually in monosyllables, unless she was providing an explanation of some kind. Even her professional façade was slipping; I noticed it during a morning cabinet meeting five days after the incident. Instead of the usual calm, collected, agreeable persona she projected, she was noticeably absent, both in her speech and expression. When the Minister of Home Affairs stopped her after the meeting to ask for clarification on some aspect of the budget agreement they'd all just spent the last couple of hours coming to, she responded in a few vague sentences and then continued on her way, earning herself a reproving glare.

"Is there something going on with the Home Affairs Ministry lately?" I asked, once we were safely in the privacy of the Prime Minister's office. "The minister didn't look particularly happy to see you today."

"What?"

She hadn't been listening. I repeated the question.

"Oh…It was probably you he wasn't happy to see, that's all…" She leaned forward and rested her forehead against her hands.

"Me?"

She nodded.

"He's been after me to disband Section 9 since he took office…doesn't like the idea of me having my own personal police force, or something like that. He has other talents, which is why I appointed him…connections in the right places and what have you. Since he can't dismiss the unit without my signature on the order, the most he can do is just try to make things difficult for everyone…" She looked up. "I'm surprised you haven't heard about any of this, really…"

"Well, one of the things I like best about being a contractor again is that I don't have to think about office politics."

"Oh…"

The Prime Minister was still looking at me, although it seemed more like she was looking through me; her eyes were barely focused, and they had a distinctly cloudy cast to them. I was on the verge of asking if she was all right when she sighed, shook her head, and got back to work.

About half an hour later, as I was carrying out my usual routine of letting my eyes move from point to point around the room, my attention was suddenly drawn to the sound of the Prime Minister's pen hitting her desk. My head immediately turned in her direction; she was leaning to one side with her right elbow still propped up on the desk, her hand hanging limply in the air. I stepped forward.

"Prime Minister?"

She didn't respond. I moved around to the front of the desk. Her eyes followed me as I came into her field of view; they were dull and disinterested, and her skin looked pale and damp.

"Prime Minister, can you hear me?"

She wavered a few seconds more, and then slumped over in a faint.


	4. Chapter 4

_So it doesn't look like it's anything life-threatening. They're still running blood tests and what have you to screen for toxins, just because it's _her_, but her doctor says it's more likely that this was the result of trying to function for almost a week on nothing but coffee and about two hours of sleep every night._

I was standing just outside the door that led to the Prime Minister's rooms. I'd sent a message to the chief as soon as I'd verified that the Prime Minister wasn't in any immediate danger.

_Anyway, she's taking the rest of the day off, and we'll see how she feels in the morning._

_I see._

_Whoever's pulling the strings in this case sure picked a hell of a time; having to sit out for at least a day is just going to make the Prime Minister even worse. She's been miserable enough between her usual work stress and now this death threat – I can't wait to see her after having missed an entire day out of her agenda._

_Hmm. Actually, this seems to have come at a perfect time…_

_…Chief?_

_The crime lab is still finishing the report on the analysis of Mari's cyberbrain; they were going to send it to you later today, I believe. Anyway, the fact of the matter is this: it was another hacking from the Ministry of Defense, only this time the perpetrator wasn't nearly as neat, and we were able to recover a code that pointed us to his terminal._

_He was stupid enough to use a work terminal that could be traced? How exactly has this guy been eluding us for so long?_

_Let me finish. We located him by cross-referencing the code we found with a list of the programmers who'd worked on Mari's defense barriers and cyberbrain software. As you suspected, he's a barrier programmer; his name is Yukio Satou, and he was transferred over from the Home Affairs Ministry eight months ago. We took him into custody, of course, and he confessed to everything at almost the moment the interrogation started._

_Which means he was working for someone and wanted to downplay his own hand in the proceedings by shifting the blame onto someone else._

_Precisely._

_So, was this Satou guy nice enough to tell you who gave him his orders?_

_He named a few people from the data protection department of the Home Affairs Ministry where he used to work, although from his testimony and from the subsequent examination of his cyberbrain, it appears as though his memory was overwritten in those areas, and the people whose names he gave us might not have had anything to do with this. To learn more, we'll have to perform our own investigation of those offices and work our way up from there._

_All right, but I still don't get how this ties in with the Prime Minister's little fainting spell._

_If someone in the Home Affairs Ministry is behind the attempt on the Prime Minister's life, there's every chance that they'll move up the next phase of their plan if they find out we're heading a serious investigation, and since they've lost their hacker, they'll probably begin using brute force instead. I don't doubt that you'd be able to deal with it, but for security's sake I'd rather have the Prime Minister clear of the area entirely, and if we can do that under the cover of her health issues, all the better. I'd like you to persuade her to leave the office for a few days._

I froze momentarily.

_You can't be serious. It's been hell trying to keep her away from her work just for this afternoon - She'll have a fit if I ask her to leave entirely, and I'm about through dealing with her fits._

_Well, try anyway. I'll be waiting to hear back from you._

_You're not paying me nearly enough for this._

_If the taxpayers knew exactly what I was paying you, they'd most certainly disagree. Go do your job._

_Ye-es, chief._

I closed the link with a heavy sigh. This just kept getting better and better.

I made my way down the hallway that ran the length of the residential wing. I'd never been back here before, and I was surprised at how plainly it was decorated. Given the Prime Minister's obsessive cataloguing and organization of every other aspect of her life, I'd imagined her living quarters to be bound by some kind of unified theme, where everything from the drapes to the blossoms on the houseplants were coordinated. Instead, it was even more minimalistic than my place, which was saying something.

The door at the very end of the hall was the one that led to the Prime Minister's bedroom. I knocked hesitantly.

"Prime Minister?"

There was a moment of silence, and I wondered if she'd actually done as she'd been told and decided to catch up on her sleep.

"Major Kusanagi? Come in."

Apparently not.

I pushed the door open slowly. The room was as elegantly blank as the rest of the space had been, although at least it looked lived in. The Prime Minister, dressed in her nightclothes, was sitting upright, supported by about three pillows, with the covers pulled up to her waist, focused rather intently on her notebook terminal. I raised an eyebrow.

"You're supposed to be _resting_, you know."

"I'm fine, really," she said, without looking up. "I was just a little lightheaded earlier. That's all."

"I wouldn't call half-sleeping through a cabinet meeting and then passing out being 'a little lightheaded'."

"If I wanted your opinion on the matter, I'd ask."

She was back in her snapping-at-people mood again, either because of her frustration at having to cancel her schedule for the rest of the day or because of her frustration with herself for losing face so spectacularly. Quite possibly a combination of both.

A few days away from all of this would probably be good for her anyway, security concerns aside.

"So, are you just here to harass me, or was there something else?"

"I just talked to the chief – they're going to send me the complete report later, but they found the person who hacked Mari. He was a barrier programmer with the Defense Ministry, although he says he was under orders from someone in the Home Affairs Ministry. Right now the investigation has shifted onto the people he named, although apparently it's likely that they were being manipulated as well. We'll have to follow the trail and see how high up the ladder it goes."

"I see," said the Prime Minister.

I had her attention; now for the tricky part.

"Because of the nature of the threat, the chief wants you to leave the premises for the duration of the investigation."

She stared at me for a long minute, unsure how to respond, and then realized that I was being completely serious.

"Out of the question."

I sighed. "Prime Minister-"

"Don't even," she said, and I was momentarily struck by the amount of force she could present even when she was only half dressed and about two feet below my eye level. She _had_ changed a lot in the last couple of years.

"I'm not _you_ people, and I hope you can understand that," she continued. "I can't just drop everything and go to ground at the first sign of danger. I'm well aware of the risks that go along with my position, but I also have work that needs to be done and a public that needs to be constantly reassured, and I can't do these things if I'm sitting on my hands for a week under house arrest somewhere with the security shooting anyone who so much as looks at the place funny. It's bad enough that I've lost half a day already. By all means, find out who's behind this and put an end to it, but at least let me do my job in the meantime."

I indulged her look of simmering resentment for a moment, then narrowed my eyes and took a step closer to her.

"With all due respect, this isn't the first sign of danger; it's more like the third. At this point, if I could, I'd get my own team to stand in for your security staff, only I can't because most of them are otherwise engaged right now. I need you to trust me when I say that this is the most efficient way to protect you."

Her mutinous glare softened slightly.

"Also, you're forgetting that because _I'm_ the one protecting you, you have options open to you that are much nicer than the house arrest scenario you outlined. More specifically, I've got a place on the coast near here – it's completely secure and doesn't exist on any official records, of course. We can lay low there for a few days until I get an all clear, and it should be easy enough to use your little episode earlier today as a cover story."

Another long pause. It looked like she was at least considering it, but since she was in a mood, I didn't want to push her at the moment.

"I'll be back later. Do yourself a favor and get some rest; while your devotion to your job is inspiring, you're not going to be good for much if you keep fainting."

She nodded sullenly, and I turned to leave.

"Wait…"

I turned around again. "Yes?"

"Have you…heard anything more about Mari?"

The look of genuine concern on her face was oddly endearing.

"I haven't. I can ask, though, if you'd like."

"Thank you," she said, and then she was back to sulking. I bowed politely and left the room.

Once I was back out in the hallway, I contacted the chief again.

_It's me._

_How's it coming?_

_As expected. I'm going to leave her alone for a little while, since she's not in the best of moods right now, but I'll keep wearing her down._

_Please do – I'd like to get the investigation underway as soon as possible._

_Got it. Hey, besides the information about that barrier programmer, how did the analysis of Mari's cyberbrain come out? Will they be able to salvage her?_

_I believe some of her parts will have to be replaced due to physical damage, but provided she was fully backed up, which she should have been, our people should be able to restore her. Why do you ask?_

_The Prime Minister wanted to know, that's all. Thanks._

_The full report should be with you sometime in the next hour, if you'd like to read it yourself._

_Fine. I'll let you know how everything is next time I talk to the Prime Minister._

_Please do._

I closed the channel and went back to doing nothing.

About half an hour later, I received an incoming transmission from the forensic analysis team.

_I just sent you the report on the investigation into the hacking of the Prime Minister's assistant, Major. It's in your shared memory space._

_Thank you – I'll transfer it right now._

Usually no one sent things to my designated shared memory anymore, but I didn't often deal with the crime lab, and I supposed they'd forgotten. I connected to Section 9's central server, found my pitifully empty folder with the lone report readout inside, and copied the file into my own cyberbrain. I had nothing else to do, so I decided to read through it. It was pretty much the same thing the chief had told me earlier, only with a more detailed analysis of the damage that Mari had sustained. I glanced through the list – with the experience our team already had working with bioroids, none of it would be especially difficult to fix.

My mind wandered to the barrier programmer, Yukio Satou, who was responsible for all of this. Even though his memory had been tampered with, he'd still named the people in the Home Affairs Ministry he thought had given him orders. Either the people up the chain were incredibly sloppy, or he was trying to tell us something.

On a sudden whim, and probably because I was bored, I opened up a new channel.

_ Ishikawa – would you mind sending me the transcript of Yukio Satou's interrogation?_

_No problem. Just give me a second._

_I can wait._

Momentarily an alert flashed in the corner of my field of vision, telling me I had an incoming file and that my barriers hadn't detected any threats from it. I accepted it, and a minute later it was waiting safely in my cyberbrain.

_Thanks._

_Don't mention it. Playing detective on your off hours?_

_Something like that._

_Who knows, maybe you'll find something in there that we didn't. It turns out that the guy's cyberbrain had been messed with so much that barely anything in there is credible evidence anyway – all we've got is that it goes up into the Home Affairs Ministry._

_Yeah, the chief told me. Anyway, I'll let you know if I see anything._

I opened the transcript and began to scroll through it. Again, it was basically what the chief had paraphrased for me earlier. Satou had confessed to everything up front, and then, when asked if he'd acted on his own or under someone else's orders, had named four people: Yoshiyuki Maeno, Nobuo Kawakami, Taro Hiroki, and Mai Yukino, all employees of the Ministry of Home Affairs' data management crew.

Out of curiosity, I searched for each name in the Ministry's employee registry. None of them came up as part of the data protection team. I expanded the search to the entire staff - the only matching name was that of Taro Hiroki, and he was one of the building maintenance people.

Well, that was odd.

I searched for the other three in the MHLW records. They were present and accounted for, although none of them held jobs that had anything to do with the Home Affairs Ministry. The only thing tying them together was the fact that they all lived and worked in Fukuoka.

And yet Satou had repeated this list of names several times throughout his testimony. Always in the same order.

I listed the names vertically, looking for some kind of pattern that could have eluded me.

Maeno. Kawakami. Hiroki. Yukino.

Mae-kawa-hiro-yuki.

Hiroyuki Maekawa, the Minister of Home Affairs.

That was it.

_Hey, Ishikawa. I think Mr. Satou was trying to tell us something after all. Look at the names he gave._

_What about them? He said they all used to work with him, but only one of them's a government employee at all. They all know him, though – hell, the one lady is his next-door neighbor._

_But look at the family names. The first character of each one, in the order he listed them._

_Mae…kawa…Hiroyuki Maekawa?_

_Exactly. Even though Satou's memory had been fragmented to cover up what he knew, he still remembered - he just couldn't string the whole name together, so he had to give us the pieces out of names he _did_ remember._

_So it's the Minister of Home Affairs who's after the Prime Minister?_

_Looks like it._

_And this makes how many cabinet members she's had to have arrested since she took office? Jeez. Tell her that she's an awful judge of character._

_I'll pass it on. Is the chief available now? Can you put me through to him?_

_Sure thing._

The connection faded out and then cleared again.

_Yes, Major?_

_I was reading through the transcript of the interrogation of that man Satou, and I found something interesting._

_What is it?_

I sent him a copy of the file, with notes added to highlight my discovery. There was a long pause.

_Hmm. If you're right about this, the situation suddenly seems to have become much more complicated._

_No kidding. And it doesn't make any sense – I thought the Prime Minister was on fairly good terms with the Home Affairs Ministry._

_Maekawa hasn't exactly been happy with the extent of her reliance on Section 9, or with the amount of support she's given us. Perhaps that could have something to do with it?_

_Still, it seems a little extreme to try to kill someone over something like that._

_I agree completely, however, we need to verify that the Minister of Home Affairs really is the one at the back of all this before we begin jumping to conclusions._

_Should I tell the Prime Minister?_

_I'll leave that up to you. Just try your hardest to get her clear of the area as soon as possible so we can get to the bottom of this._

_Roger._

I closed the channel and went back to my guard duty with renewed energy. Somehow I kept managing to push to the back of my mind that I hadn't slept at all in nearly two weeks; I'd been meaning to, before my brain decided on its own that it needed to shut down and recharge, but things always seemed to keep coming up.

I went to see the Prime Minister again later that evening, to tell her the news about Mari if nothing else. To my surprise, she seemed more like her usual self than I'd seen her in the last month.

"I took a nap," she admitted when I commented on how much better she was looking.

"Well, I got the report from the crime lab," I said, "and it looks like Mari's going to be fine – they just need to replace the parts of her brain that were damaged, plus the arm I broke, and then they can bring her back online from the backup of her memory. It should only take a couple weeks."

"That's wonderful to hear," said the Prime Minister, smiling. "Thank you."

"It's no trouble – after all, they did the prototype testing on the early model bioroids, so fixing a stable one like that is nothing for them."

"I'll just be glad to have her back. Miss Nakano…I hate to call her 'useless', but…"

"No no," I said, smiling a little in spite of myself. "In fact, you should be congratulated for coming up with an organizational system for yourself that only an AI is capable of managing correctly."

After weeks of paranoia-induced depression, the Prime Minister's newfound good humor was strangely contagious.

"By the way," she said slowly, "I'm sorry for the way I treated you earlier. You were only trying to do your job, and…now that I've thought about it, I suppose it's probably a good idea for me to be out of the way for a little while."

I blinked. This was suddenly much easier than I'd thought it would be.

"So I should tell the chief that he's clear to move ahead with the investigation?"

"I…Yes. I'd just appreciate it if I could get back to work as soon as possible."

"We shouldn't be gone longer than a couple of days – my people work fast. Will you be ready to leave tomorrow morning?"

I'd decided I wasn't going to tell her about the Minister of Home Affairs for the time being – she was finally somewhat pleasant to be around again, and I didn't want to do anything to ruin that if I had to be alone with her for a weekend.

"That's fine," she said resignedly. "Should I tell anyone about this?"

"No," I said. "Partly for security reasons, and partly because I don't want the location of my private property compromised. I figure we'll head out early tomorrow, and the chief can just let your security people know that you're in Section 9's custody and that everything's all right. He'll come up with something convincing."

"Fair enough. How early?"

"About six or so, I should think. I want to do this as quickly as possible."

She nodded. "Is that it?"

I thought for a moment.

"Dress comfortably – this is a vacation for you as well, after all."

She sighed. "If I must."

"Well, now that that's settled, I need to go let the chief know. I'll see you tomorrow."

"I see. Good night."

The sleepy feeling leapt to the forefront of my mind, and I shoved it back again. I could make it through the weekend, I was sure.

"Good night."

I walked out into the hallway and then sent a message to the chief.

_Mission accomplished – We're leaving tomorrow morning, so everything'll be clear for you._

_Excellent._

_I'll need you to explain to the staff here why the Prime Minister is suddenly missing, though._

_That can be taken care of. You'll be at the first location you designated?_

_Yes, and if someone hits us there, we'll move to the next place on the list. I have everything ready._

_That's good. I don't expect that you'll have any trouble, but given the situation it's best to be prepared, just in case._

_Well, you know what I always say – it never hurts to be paranoid._


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning, the Prime Minister and I left just as the sun was coming up, a little ahead of schedule. I'd gone to see if she was awake only half an hour before; she was, in addition to dressed, packed, and already having eaten. Not wanting to waste time, I had gone to retrieve my car from the private lot where I'd been storing it for the past month. When I pulled around to the rear entrance of the Prime Minister's residence, I'd found her outside waiting for me.

She was awfully enthusiastic for someone who'd flat out refused to consider leaving her office for any amount of time only the day before.

"Well," she said when I mentioned this, "it _is_ a bit exciting. Almost like running away from home."

I wasn't sure whether to take that as a good thing or a bad thing. I eventually decided to just enjoy the fact that she wasn't making everyone miserable anymore.

And really, I wasn't too upset myself at the prospect of taking a break from a full month of high-security guard duty. While it was true that I was really only relocating the job somewhere else, at that particular moment I was back in my own clothes with nothing ahead of me but a long drive with very little traffic to get in my way, and it was hard not to feel just a little bit elated.

I'd expected the Prime Minister to chatter more during the trip, but she was actually very quiet. Whenever I spared a glance in her direction, she was watching the landscape pass by with rapt attention – she looked like she'd never seen the world outside her little office complex before and was honestly overwhelmed by everything. It was the sort of thing that probably would have been adorable for a six-year-old but that was profoundly disturbing in a middle-aged woman, and I wondered if she wasn't being so adamant about getting back to work as soon as possible just because she had no idea what to do with herself when taken away from it.

Just what the hell _had_ she done before she'd become prime minister, anyway? Waited around for someone to nominate her for the position?

It was midmorning when I finally turned up the drive that led to the particular safehouse at which we'd be spending the next couple of days. It was just large enough to be able to pass for an ordinary vacation home without being so large that the yearly upkeep fees on it would be obscene, and it was set back some distance from the road, which made it all the more convenient for my purposes. Even though the property had come with its own security system already installed, I'd augmented it with some of my own equipment, including a net of sensors that extended two hundred meters in every direction, even out onto the water and underground. Anyone who got in range of those sensors would be scanned, flagged, and reported to me immediately, and I'd have plenty of time to decide if they were a threat or not. I'd also modified all of the locks to deadbolt themselves unless my specific cyberbrain patterns were within a meter of them, and heaven help anyone who decided to try his luck breaking one of the windows.

There were worse places to stash a top-ranking government official for a weekend.

The Prime Minister, for her part, was obviously impressed and doing an awful job of hiding it, which surprised me – I suppose I'd just assumed that the general decorum of her life would have desensitized her to anything so decidedly humble. But then again, this was the woman who'd actually thanked me for raising a thoroughly unnecessary alarm and causing her no small amount of distress, so all bets were off.

"Isn't it inconvenient to have a place like this all the way out near Fukuoka?" she said quietly as I pulled into the garage. It was the first thing she'd said to me in over an hour. "I thought you did most of your work around Niihama…"

"I do, and most of my properties are in that area. But now that I'm working freelance, every so often I'll get sent somewhere else, and it's always a good idea to have a safe place to run to just in case. Like right now, for example."

I opened the trunk and started gathering together the things from my emergency kit that I needed to take inside – this house was one of my newest acquisitions, and it wasn't as well stocked as my others. The Prime Minister stayed where she was.

"And…are they all like this?"

I looked up. "Like what?"

"Well…it just seems odd to….I mean, with the scenery and everything…It's so… _nice_," she finished awkwardly.

I couldn't help it – I actually laughed.

"What, you were still expecting something underground without any windows? If I'm going to put the resources into a house, I at least want it to be worth spending time in. I don't always come out here just to hide, you know."

Usually on those occasions I wasn't _alone_, either, but I didn't feel any pressing need to mention that.

"I see…"

I finished packing together my supplies and then handed the Prime Minister the bag with her things in it.

"Here – c'mon inside."

I opened the side door and walked through – the lights turned on automatically, illuminating the single open room. I left my shoes at the door and then turned around.

"Right – over there is the kitchen," I said, pointing to the tiled corner of the room. "There's food for whenever you're hungry, so help yourself." I set my bag down on the table. "I still need to pack everything away, but weapons will be there, in case anything happens." I said, pointing to an inconspicuous cabinet against the far wall. "I'll give you the override key to open it, and I brought camouflage for you as well."

The Prime Minister nodded, and I led the way up the stairs to the second floor. I heard her gasp as she came into the light, airy room, and this time I completely understood why; it was really a very lovely room, with a glass ceiling that arched down smoothly to become the wall, broken only by a screen door that led out onto a broad balcony overlooking the beach and admitting a spectacular view of the sea.

"The lounge," I said, waving my hand toward the space. "Bathroom," –I pointed toward a door in the rear wall—"and here's where you'll be sleeping."

I drew aside the sliding door in the partition that ran the length of the room (the ceiling arced upward even higher, so that the entire roof was skylights), revealing a spacious bedroom which contained only a chest of drawers, a couple of floor lamps, and a wide, low bed, already made up.

"So there you go – make yourself at home, and let me know if you need anything. I'll try to stay out of your way otherwise."

"Oh, no!" said the Prime Minister, looking affronted. "It's your house, after all…I'm not going to expect you to keep yourself hidden the whole time….Besides, if I wanted to feel socially isolated, I could do that back in my office."

I sighed. "Fair enough."

"And…I'm not taking a bed away from you or anything, am I?"

The tired feeling struck me right between the eyes, only from the inside of my head. It was incredibly unpleasant. _Not now_, I told it.

"Do you honestly think I'd go to sleep when I'm the only one around to protect you?" I said.

She blinked, as if she'd never considered the possibility that I didn't sleep at night when she did.

"Well…I suppose not."

"Then don't worry about it. Now, may I have your permission to link directly for a few minutes? I need to give you a couple of files."

"That's fine."

I extended a cable from the back of my neck and offered the other end to the Prime Minister; she pushed her hair out of the way and plugged it into one of her own ports, and then closed her eyes.

Even though this was only the second time I'd linked with her, I could tell that she was one of those people who probably never would have gotten cyberized if their work hadn't practically required it – she wasn't at all used to using her cyberbrain this way, and she ascribed an odd sense of…well, _intimacy_, almost, to a simple direct transfer like this. It was very strange, although out of consideration for her discomfort I tried to transfer the necessary files as quickly as possible.

"The first one I'll need you to install right away," I said as I retracted the cable. "It's the driver for the thermoptic camouflage. The suit plugs into your cyberbrain, and you turn it on and off with cyberbrain commands. The software will tell you what to do."

She nodded. "And the second?"

"Access codes," I said. "They're labeled – most are for locks and things around the house, but there's also a code you can use to contact headquarters if anything happens to me and you need help. I have people standing by waiting for an emergency call from me, so if you just explain what's going on they'll come out to get you."

She nodded again. "What are the chances that I'll encounter such a situation?"

"Close to none. For now, just relax and enjoy your couple of days off. You could certainly use them."

"All right," she said. I thought I heard her voice trembling – was she going through withdrawal already?

How completely ridiculous.

"I'll be around if you need me, then," I said, and went back downstairs to finish unpacking. The Prime Minister was a big girl; she could take care of herself.

For the next hour I occupied myself putting away the supplies I'd brought in, then checking and re-checking to make sure that the security sensors were all active and that the decoy system was functioning. I had just finished running a diagnostic test when the Prime Minister came cautiously down the stairs. I didn't bother to look up – I was still messing with the settings on the alarm interface.

"Hmm?"

"I…Would it be too much trouble for me to go for a walk?"

"No," I said "Just give me a minute – I'll go with you."

I finalized the settings on the security system and then retrieved my shoes. I probably could have let her go by herself, but I was being paid to look after her, and that was what I intended to do.

And really, it wasn't particularly onerous; the Prime Minister wandered around the grounds, and I stayed a few steps behind her. She was almost comically out of her element here – I was so used to seeing her striding purposefully, if not always confidently, from office to office in her neat suit that the image of her in a simple skirt and blouse, meandering slowly wherever her thoughts took her, was just wrong, although wrong in an amusing way. Again, the fact that the bits of the world not directly in front of her desk seemed to leave her in a state of awe was troubling, but now that I'd thought about it for a while I actually felt a bit sorry for her. Even if she had any time for herself she probably would have wanted to spend it sleeping, or, more likely, just working anyway.

After about half an hour the Prime Minister decided to go back up to the house and make herself lunch, and I went upstairs to check in with headquarters.

_Hey, chief – how're things going on your end?_

_The operation is underway. And you?_

_Nothing out here so far. Let me know if you need my assistance with anything – I'll probably be looking for something to do before too long._

_I'll do that. So far we haven't encountered anything too problematic, but it's still early in the investigation._

_I see. Keep me posted._

The rest of the afternoon passed by uneventfully. The Prime Minister went to sit out on the porch and read, and I stayed inside, trying not to pass out. I couldn't remember the last time I'd let myself get this tired; even during my freelance days with the Department of Defense, I rarely had to be up for more than six days at a time. It was painful.

To distract myself, I connected to my external memory server and started going through my messages, something else I'd been neglecting for the last couple of weeks. It looked like I would have plenty of work from my usual sources lined up as soon as this job was over, plus Kurutan wanted me to call her the minute I got home.

That was yet _another_ thing I'd been putting off for far too long.

I really hated jobs like this; it would be nice to get back to my own life once it was all over. Which hopefully wouldn't be too much longer.

I got up, stretched, and went outside to check on the Prime Minister. She had fallen asleep; her chin was resting on her shoulder, and the book she'd been reading was hanging from one hand.

Oh, how I envied her at that moment.

The day wore on. The Prime Minister eventually woke up and came back inside to get a sweater, then went back out to sit for another hour or so, then came in again to go downstairs and eat. I watched her passively as she moved in and out of my sight, half there, half inside my own head trying to keep myself occupied, and always aware, somewhere, of the security network, in case the sensors should pick up anything. I hadn't heard from the chief or anyone else, although I assumed that this only meant that everything was progressing as planned for them.

It started to rain just after sunset. I could hear the drops hitting the roof and windows, intermittently at first, and then with increasing regularity until the sound was a steady hiss. The overhead lights came on automatically, responding to the darkness outside and the presence of cyberbrain activity in the room.

A few hours later, the Prime Minister told me that she was going to bed. She may have been in the same room with me all along, or she may have been downstairs – I honestly didn't know. I nodded and told her good night, and she disappeared into her room. The light turned off soon after.

I sat by myself for another half hour or so, listening to the rain outside.

Would it really be so bad if I let myself sleep for a while? The security system would wake me up if anything happened, and it wasn't like I had anything to do. And if a situation did occur, wouldn't it be better if I was fully functional?

It all sounded perfectly reasonable. I was only going to need a couple of hours, anyway. Just enough time to let my systems recharge.

I leaned over into the couch cushions and closed my eyes, then started shutting down unnecessary processes. Usually when I slept I left the external things running anyway, but right now I wanted to conserve as much energy as possible.

I had just turned everything off and made myself comfortable when the door to the Prime Minister's room slid open.

Damn.

I opened my eyes again.

"Are you all right?"

She sighed. "Can't sleep."

She was wearing her bathrobe over her nightclothes. I hadn't really registered how cold it had gotten, and the shorts and tank top I was wearing must have looked quite odd to her.

"Can I sit down?"

"Go ahead," I said. Now it was a challenge – just how much longer could I tough this out?

She settled herself on the opposite end of the couch from me. I teetered on the brink of asking her what was up – on one hand I didn't really care, but on the other she had been much less annoying so far than I'd anticipated, and the conversation would help me stay awake. I went for it, and she seemed honestly surprised.

"Well…I suppose….even though this isn't exactly a wonderful situation to be in….I'm glad I was able to come out here and finally have some time to myself. Thank you."

I nodded. "I try to be worth my price tag."

She laughed softly, even though I hadn't really meant it to be funny. There was a moment of silence, and then she sighed again.

"Maybe you can't understand this, since practically your whole life is secrecy, but…I've been thinking, and it's kind of frightening how accustomed I've become to having everything I do be someone else's business."

I looked up.

"I mean," she continued, "I understand the reason for it….It would be foolish to leave myself completely unsecured, and since I'm supposed to be representative of Japan to the rest of the world, obviously everyone I'm representing would want to know if I was involved in anything unsavory, but…it's like I don't even exist as my own person anymore."

"I'd assume that's just one of the prices you have to pay when you agree to become the Prime Minister," I said, trying not to sound unkind, or like I'd really been looking forward to finally getting some rest.

"Oh, of course," she said. "And I knew it was going to happen, and ultimately I don't regret accepting the nomination. It's just that…well, being away from all of that…it's reminded me of some things I thought I'd forgotten."

I was interested in spite of myself – to be completely honest, I'd never really thought of the Prime Minister as her own independent person either. She'd always been the figure at the top of the chain who'd given me orders, and whom I'd just happened to disagree with slightly less than her predecessors.

And then I thought, how lonely she must be, to come to _me_ with all of this.

"You know, ten years ago…or maybe it was even a bit longer," she said, looking up at the ceiling; the rain was still coming down hard. "I was still just Yoko Kayabuki, and I was a lawyer in Niihama…I went to work and took care of my own apartment and did my own shopping, and no one cared about any of it. If it was a nice day and I wanted to walk home instead of taking the train, or if I wanted to go out with the other people in my office after work, I didn't have to ask anyone. If I wanted to meet up with a boyfriend, I didn't have to worry about what the rest of the world would think of him."

Well, _there_ was a side to the Prime Minister that I'd never thought about before.

Although really, she was not an unattractive woman. In fact, now that I was seeing her with her hair loose and without her makeup, she was actually quite pretty, in her own respectable, understated sort of way.

I cut that line of thought short before it went anywhere else. Why had _that_ come into my head, of all things?

"And then, of course," she went on, "once I got into politics, I had to be whatever _they_ wanted me to be, and it got worse the higher up I went…Did you know that I was half Chinese up until three years ago?"

I was still trying to keep a hold on my subconscious. "What?"

"My press management agents decided that it wasn't appropriate for Japan's first female Prime Minister to be anything other than a pure-blooded Japanese national, so they changed the registry and I'm not allowed to tell anyone about it. Silly, isn't it?"

It was; almost unbelievably so. She laughed quietly to herself.

"They were all set to go pay people off in my hometown, and they asked me who else knew….it was only my mother and father, and since my father was dead and my mother had disowned me years ago, there weren't any loose ends to worry about. " She laughed again. "I'm surprised they didn't ask me to go marry someone as well, just to complete the image…"

She trailed off uncomfortably.

"Anyway," she said, "this is the first time in a long while that I've actually felt like myself again. So…thanks for that."

There was something odd about the way she was looking at me, but I couldn't quite decide what it was.

And then an alarm went off in my head.

A breach. I stood up at once.

"What is it?" said the Prime Minister.

"Someone's here," I said. "Nine people within range. Military identification codes. Go get your camouflage on."

She nodded and darted into her bedroom. I turned off the lights and hurried downstairs, shedding my clothes as I went. I unlocked the storage cabinet and quickly pulled on my own camouflage, then strapped my body armor into place and, after making sure it was loaded, slid my sidearm into the holster at my back. I considered the assault rifle, but ultimately decided that it would only slow me down.

While I armed myself, I messaged headquarters.

_Requesting immediate assistance – send backup units to the designated rendezvous point._

_Major? What's going on?_

_Batou! I've got intruders – GSDF codes on the radar. I'm going to try to outrun them. Just meet up with us as quickly as you can._

_Roger that. I'm on my way._

I closed the connection and ran back upstairs.

"Prime Minister?"

"Here," she said. Her voice trembled in the darkness.

"Okay – we're going to make a break for it. I need you to try to keep up with me, and don't look back."

She nodded.

"Let's go."

I grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her out onto the porch, then down the set of stairs that led to the beach. It was still raining hard, but even switched off, the camouflage would still help us blend in to the darkness.

The house had locked itself as I passed out of range – that would at least buy us some time.

While we ran between patches of cover, I worked on getting into the communications channel that our guests were using. As I'd expected, it was a rigid military-use barrier, and it really wasn't all that much trouble to slip around, even with the randomly changing encryption.

_Target is on the move. All units to the eastern perimeter._

They knew exactly where we were.

This was about to get more complicated than I'd anticipated.

I opened up an encrypted channel.

_Prime Minister, do you have your GPS activated?_

_Yes, why?_

_Turn it off – they're using it to follow us._

_I...I don't remember how to turn it off…I've never had to!_

I sighed angrily.

_Let me._

I plugged into her head and started looking for the program. It didn't take very long, as the Prime Minister was nice enough to point me toward it. I disabled it at once.

There was no response from the enemy.

_Dammit…they must have you bugged. I don't want to stay in one place too long – go into autistic mode for the time being, and I'll deal with it once we're safe. You do know how to do that, right?_

_Of course I do!_

I didn't disconnect from her until I was sure she'd done it correctly. I knew because the com channel I'd tapped was suddenly very active.

_Target has disappeared. Performing another sweep of the immediate area._

_Does anyone have visual confirmation yet?_

_No trace of cyberbrain patterns detected…_

I thought of switching over to autistic mode myself, but I needed to have my networking functions enabled in case someone sent me a message; I'd have to risk it.

"Let's go."

They were expecting us to the east; I turned and ran south, my hand still tight on the Prime Minister's wrist. The rendezvous point was still further east, but it was going to take my team a while to make it out here, and there was plenty of time to circle around and double back.

_I have visual confirmation of target. Sending coordinates to all units._

Shit.

I pulled the Prime Minister behind the nearest tree and took my gun out of its holster.

"Stay quiet – there's someone near enough to see us."

She nodded.

I moved out in front of the Prime Minister, my gun at the ready.

A shot zipped past me, several feet to the left.

My eyes followed it back to the source; a flicker of movement among the trees.

I fired six rounds at it without hesitation.

_4-102 is down. Repeat, 4-102 is down. All units report to those coordinates._

"Time to go," I said. I dug further into the com channel, hoping to find the GPS data of the approaching soldiers, at the same time trying to anticipate which direction they'd figure we were most likely to head in.

The odds weren't exactly in our favor, but as long as we stayed on the move, we had a chance.

Another shot rang out, this time to my right.

_Target sighted, heading south toward the road._

I kept moving – I couldn't see whoever had shot last, and I didn't want to fire in completely the wrong direction and give away my position again.

This would have been so much easier if it had been just me – eight hostiles were no problem, even when I couldn't camouflage myself. Dragging a terrified Prime Minister behind me was an entirely different, much more complicated situation. It wouldn't have been so bad, even, if I'd been able to tell her to stay put somewhere with her camouflage on, but that was impossible with the rain.

A branch snapped behind me, and I turned around, firing at once at the shadow I could just see about thirty feet away. It crumpled.

I could hear the rest of them now, close by, in all directions; apparently we hadn't moved fast enough. This was going to be interesting.

"Prime Minister – we're surrounded. Get behind me."

She didn't need to be told twice.

I held my gun out, waiting for the first figure to appear, firing the minute I saw it. The man dropped at once.

Then one more, similarly dispatched. I was running low on ammo – I hadn't counted on any actual fighting. Maybe if I'd been half awake I'd've thought to bring more than one gun.

Son of a bitch.

Suddenly there was a blaze of light.

"Surrender and release your hostage immediately!"

…What?

I held my gun at the ready.

"Under whose authority are you acting?" I shouted.

Nobody seemed to want to answer. All I heard were four more guns being cocked, in roughly a circle around our position. Plus the four I'd already taken out, that made nine – everyone was here. I figured I'd try again.

"I'm with Public Security Section 9 – there seems to have been some sort of misunderstanding here! I'm asking for full disclosure of the situation!"

I thought of asking the Prime Minister to back me up, but it was possible that they were bluffing in order to get her out from behind me so they'd have a clear shot.

"Ma'am, there's no need to make this difficult! Drop your weapon and release your hostage! If you don't comply, we'll have to resort to deadly force!"

Well, no one could say I hadn't given it my best effort.

"And what happens to _her_ when I let you people take her, huh?" I said; then I sprang forward.

It became obvious at once that I was indeed their target – five assault rifles opened fire the minute I moved, curiously reluctant to fire in the direction of the Prime Minister. Suddenly things were much easier.

I wove in and out of the gunfire as well as I could, taking advantage of the fact that it was dark and raining and that my eyesight and mobility were much better than that of the people I was up against. I spent my last six shots on two of the soldiers, then spun around to one side to avoid a hail of bullets from one of their companions. From there I leapt easily onto a low hanging branch, and then dropped down behind the man who'd just fired at me and disabled him. Another one of them was heading for the Prime Minister, and I tore after him, weaving from side to side again to make myself a harder target to hit, although it didn't stop the last soldier from trying. A few minutes later, they were both on the ground.

The exertion had been so great that my body was overheating – steam rose off of my skin as the rain hit it.

After making sure the area was secure, I turned back to the Prime Minister. She was still against the tree where I'd left her, and she looked as though she was about to faint.

"Come on – we've still got a little ways to go."

She didn't move; instead, she slumped to the ground, breathing heavily.

It was then that I noticed the blood spreading slowly from the dark hole on the outside of her left leg.

I knelt down at once to look at the wound, at the same time cursing myself both for letting it happen and for not anticipating that it might happen and preparing adequately. I should have made an excuse to sleep a week ago. This was unacceptable.

The Prime Minister, for her part, sat very still, occasionally taking in a sharp breath when I hurt her, but otherwise completely detached from her surroundings. Emotional shock. I'd have to think fast to keep her from going into circulatory shock. My brain raced through the field surgery methods I'd picked up during my time in the armed forces; first and foremost, I had to try to control the bleeding. Direct pressure to the wound and limit the circulation.

I tore a strip of material from the Prime Minister's camouflage, just below the tear already made by the bullet, folded it over on itself twice, and pressed it hard against the entry wound. She cried out briefly.

"Yeah, I know," I said, trying to speak calmly to avoid exciting her and making the situation worse. "But the pain's going to help you stay conscious, all right?"

She nodded.

"Now, I need you to move onto your right side and pull your leg up far enough that you can hold this in place yourself – I'm going to put pressure here" –I touched a point on the back of her leg- "and slow the circulation to the wound."

Slowly, clumsily, she did as I'd asked.

"Good. We'll just stay here for the time being – I'll call in and let my team know where we are. Whatever you do, don't let yourself fall asleep."

Another nod.

I opened a cybercomm channel.

_Batou – how far out are you?_

_ETA's 45 minutes. How about you?_

_There's been a change in plans – I need you to come pick us up at the coordinates I'm sending you. The Prime Minister's been shot and I don't want to risk moving her._

_Understood. Are you still being pursued?_

_Not at the moment – they might have a backup unit on the way, though, since I took out the initial team._

_And let me guess, there's not a scratch on _you.

I ignored the jab – I felt bad enough about that already.

_They were gunning for me. Treating it like a hostage case._

_What?_

_That's what I thought. I wondered if it was one big miscommunication, but wouldn't they send the local police, or _us_, even, to deal with something like that instead of the GSDF?_

_You'd think. I'm going to copy this over to the investigation team. You just stay put – we'll be there as soon as possible._

_Hurry._

I closed the channel and turned to the Prime Minister.

"They'll be here in a little while. Just hold on."

She nodded. She was shaking hard, and no wonder, since we'd been out in the pouring rain for nearly half an hour already. I sighed.

"Here," I said, pulling her against myself as delicately as I could manage and setting my arm around her waist where the weight of it wouldn't bother her. "My body's still venting right now – it'll keep you warm."

Normally the Prime Minister probably would have recognized how incredibly awkward this was, but she was soaked through and freezing and not entirely aware of herself besides. She leaned gratefully into my side, and we settled in to wait.


	6. Chapter 6

About forty minutes later, a searchlight swept over the trees. I looked up, at the same time running a scan just to make sure it wasn't an enemy. When the familiar IFF code showed up in my cyberbrain, I smiled.

_Right on schedule._

_The trees are too close to land – we'll go down by rope and then bring you two up._

_All right._

I watched as the chopper closed in on the forest canopy, and then as eight men and what looked like a tachikoma descended. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

"Right – you three, search the immediate area and identify any bodies you find! Saito, take everyone else and head up to the Major's safehouse – there could still be hostile units hanging around, so keep an eye out."

"Roger."

One of the larger figures detatched itself from the rest of the group and jogged over to us, and I began the delicate procedure of helping the Prime Minister stand up.

"Need a hand?"

"I've got it," I said, wrapping one arm firmly around her waist and guiding her left arm over my shoulder so she could lean on me. The Prime Minister took a deep breath, and we moved slowly, carefully forward.

"How bad is it?" said Batou as he escorted us inch by inch back to the helicopter, waving away a curious rookie who'd stopped what he was doing to watch.

"Rifle fire at medium range. There's no exit wound; the bullet might have gotten lodged up against the bone. I didn't really get a chance to look at it, since I was more concerned with stopping the bleeding."

"There's an imager in the field first aid kit – you might be able to spot it with that."

"Right."

We were beneath the chopper; I reached up and grasped one of the hoist cables, tightening my other arm around the Prime Minister.

"Batou, I need you to stay here for now and do something important for me."

"What's that?"

"Pick up my car and take it to the garage across the street from headquarters. I'll come by and get it when I can."

He gave me a blank look.

"Your….Don't you think it's been impounded as evidence or something by now? And why can't you let one of the other guys handle it?"

"I'm not letting someone I don't know go off with my car. And trust me, it's still there. Here's the key code."

I sent him the cyberbrain setting that would disengage the lock.

"The key expires after 48 hours – that should be more than enough time. Don't let anything happen to it, okay?"

"Yeah. Sure."

I smiled briefly, and then yanked hard on the cable I was holding. It pulled us up toward the body of the helicopter, where an operator was waiting to help us in.

Once we were safely aboard, I settled the Prime Minister onto the bench against the wall, and then pulled the hatch closed and sent a message to the pilot.

_Take us to the following location for now, and then come back for the others._

_Yes, ma'am._

I didn't want to go back to headquarters – it was entirely likely that someone was there waiting.

It would take more than an hour to get back to Niihama; plenty of time to rest. I'd had just enough energy left in me to make sure my principal was safe – now my exhaustion was starting to show even in my movements. The Prime Minister still needed to be patched up, but I was in no condition to be doing anything that required that level of dexterity.

I called the operator over again and explained briefly what had happened. She nodded and unhooked the emergency kit from its place on the wall of the craft, then knelt down next to the Prime Minister's injury and got to work.

"Projectile detected – it appears to be a single 9.7 mm round, probably from a semi-automatic pistol."

I dimly registered that this made no sense – even though the exact specs of my prosthetic body weren't included in any official records, no one in their right mind would consider trying to stop a known military-grade cyborg with that sort of ammunition. Besides, our attackers, to the extent that I'd seen, had all been wielding assault rifles.

"The bullet is still intact," said the operator. "Should I remove it?"

"Yes," I said. "And then bag it and send it over to the forensic analysis team."

"Yes, ma'am."

She laid aside the imaging device she'd been using, then reached for a small vial and a pair of tweezers. I removed my gloves and held out my right hand so that my thumb was directly in front of the Prime Minister's mouth.

"You can't cut your senses like I can, and the micromachine anesthetic isn't going to make this anywhere near bearable for you. Bite down as hard as you can when it hurts – it'll help distract you, at least."

As out of it as she was, she still managed to look at me like I was crazy.

"Go on," I said. "It's not going to hurt me."

She nodded once.

"Ready to proceed," said the operator.

"Do it," I said.

There was a moment of silent anticipation. Then, the Prime Minister's eyes snapped wide open and she pitched forward and sank her teeth deep into the side of my hand. A muffled, rough sound issued from deep in her throat; if it had been able to make it out into the open air, it almost certainly would have been a scream.

This lasted for a minute at the most, although it seemed like much longer. Finally, the Prime Minister let go of my hand and tilted her head back, her breath coming in a series of quick gasps. The operator dropped the bloody lump of metal into a plastic bag and laid it aside.

"Worst part's over," I said. "You did well."

"I…I think I'm going to pass out," she said weakly, between breaths.

"Go ahead, if you want to."

It sounded good to me; at that point I was barely even there.

I vaguely felt the weight of the Prime Minister's head settling against my shoulder. Darkness was creeping in at the edges of my vision, and I could actually feel my brain shutting itself down.

I leaned backward, closed my eyes, and fell promptly asleep.

It felt like only a few minutes later when I opened my eyes again, but my internal clock told me it was something closer to an hour. Even though I wasn't fully recovered yet, I felt noticeably more alert and awake, and the sense of alarm coupled with my exhaustion wasn't as dire. I could hear the change in the noise of the propeller as the pilot adjusted the height – we must have been in the process of landing.

I reached over and shook the Prime Minister's shoulder gently. She flinched and pulled away, and then realized it was me.

"Sorry to startle you," I said. "We're here."

The helicopter touched down with a soft thump. I got up and slid the hatch open, then went back to see to the Prime Minister; she was still reluctant to put weight on her injured leg. I helped her down onto the rooftop, and as soon as we were clear, the operator on board closed the hatch and the helicopter took off again to go pick up the other team.

"Right," I said. "We should get going too."

"What? Where?" said the Prime Minister.

"The next safe place." I bent down slightly. "Here, get on my back."

I felt her arms slide hesitantly around my neck, and I stood up, holding her securely against my back.

"Hold on as tight as you can, and you might want to close your eyes as well."

Her arms constricted around my shoulders.

I looked around, searching for the points in the city skyline that would tell me where to go, and then, once I'd worked out where I was, ran to the far end of the roof. This wasn't going to be as tricky as I'd anticipated – I wouldn't even have noticed the added weight of the Prime Minister at all if she hadn't made her presence very clear by attempting to strangle me. She seemed to have worked out what I was planning a second before I actually did it, and she wasn't looking forward to it.

I cleared the guard rail, sprinted out onto one of the support beams, and launched myself into the night.

If I'd been by myself the trip would have been shorter, but as it was, I didn't want to jostle the Prime Minister too much, and took smaller jumps with softer landings. The buildings in this part of the city were thick enough that there were any number of routes available to me, although I did try not to travel in a straight line for too long.

Finally, I landed on the roof of a large hotel, skidding to a halt on the pavement. I'd aimed perfectly; we were on the lower portion of the roof that attached to the penthouse apartment as a patio, and about a meter to the left of the door.

The Prime Minister slid down from my back as soon as I'd stopped, and she was shaking so badly that I had to put my arm around her waist to keep her from falling over. Once she'd recovered slightly, she looked around.

"Now where are we…?"

"Home," I said. "At least, for the next few months – I usually don't live in the same place for more than a year at a time. Here."

I put my hand on the glass door; it unlocked itself and swung inward, and we stepped inside.

The Prime Minister blearily took in her new surroundings as we moved through the apartment; if she'd been fully awake, she probably would have stared twice as much as she had at my other place. At this point, however, she was too worn out to do more than limp at my side as I showed her into the guest bedroom. She was exhausted even beyond modesty - I had to help her out of her camouflage, because of her injury, and she barely made any attempt to cover herself. I supposed that it would have bothered her more if I hadn't been another woman; at least this way she could assume that I wouldn't be thinking anything unseemly about her.

To my credit, I was at least _trying_ not to, and any observations I made were purely objective.

Once she was free of the wrecked camouflage, I handed the Prime Minister a towel for her hair and went to find her something to sleep in. The only thing I could turn up was a spare bathrobe that had probably come with the place when I'd moved in, but she wrapped it gratefully around her shoulders and slid under the covers.

It only occurred to me as I was leaving the room that I hadn't scanned her brain for the program that had been broadcasting her location to the GSDF team that had come after us. I turned around again; it looked like she'd fallen asleep already, and I didn't want to wake her, especially after everything I'd put her through, but it needed to be done in case she forgot to stay in autistic mode once she woke up. It wouldn't take long anyway, and I doubted she'd notice me. The bug was bound to have been stuck to a minor process or scrap of data – if it was piggybacking off of any of her vital functions, even she would have noticed it.

As delicately as I could manage, I sat down next to her, extended a cord from the back of my neck, and pressed it into hers. Her barrier was easy enough to bypass –I'd assumed they gave the Prime Minister of Japan something more tricky than a standard military-use defense barrier, but apparently not—and soon I was running a scan of the contents of her cyberbrain, trying not to pry into the actual data while looking for any programs that shouldn't be there.

I was more than a little surprised at the state of her brain; it was incredibly disorganized. She seemed to store her memories all in once place, as they occurred, instead of separating them into relevant folders. They were tagged, at least, but that was a function of the cyberbrain software itself, and not any conscious decision of the Prime Minister's. It was hideously inefficient for quick recovery, and I wondered how the Prime Minister, who had every other bit of her life obsessively coded, catalogued, and filed away, could be so lazy with her own thoughts?

Perhaps, I thought, she still wasn't used to considering her mind that way; after all, she'd spent much more of her life without a cyberbrain than with.

At last, I located the offending bug; as I'd thought, it had latched on to a document the Prime Minister had been sent a few weeks ago. The document had been sent by the Home Affairs Ministry; once I excised the tracer program and deactivated it, I quarantined it in my own cyberbrain and sent it back to Section 9 for analysis.

I was preparing to disconnect from the Prime Minister when I was interrupted by a stray piece of data that had appeared unexpectedly; my cyberbrain self felt the sensation of stumbling backwards and then recovering after being hit in the face. A byproduct of the Prime Minister's haphazard memory storage, probably. The fragment was still flickering in front of my field of vision, and I reached out to sweep it aside.

The minute I touched it, a feeling of nervous heat twisted up inside my body. At the same time, I felt the sensation of someone's lips pressing very softly against the hollow of my throat, accompanied by a dark, confused image in which two shapes were barely distinguishable. It was so unexpected that I let go of the fragment almost at once.

This was why it was important to store one's memories properly, so that things you probably didn't want seen weren't drifting around in the open like that.

But was it a memory? It didn't appear to be tagged as such. Maybe this was how idle thoughts manifested themselves inside a disorganized cyberbrain. It certainly wasn't a dream; the Prime Minister hadn't been sleeping long enough to activate that level of brain activity, and any remaining dream data was usually overwritten by the cyberbrain within 24 hours as the space became necessary for other things.

Well, now I was curious. The sensory data was a product of the Prime Minister's cyberbrain, obviously, but the image that accompanied it was of two people – who was the other one?

It was her own fault for leaving things like this lying around, anyway. I picked up the fragment again and let it continue to dump the erratic bits of data into my head, more sensory than solid images. I hadn't noticed it before, but bound up with the feeling of nerves was a strong sense of the identity of the other party, and once I'd registered it I dropped the fragment again.

It was _me_.

Maybe this wasn't something she'd consciously thought of, I said to myself, trying to rationalize. It could have been something that had just come into her mind; I'd been with her for the last month, after all, and as a familiar image, her subconscious probably had all sorts of interesting uses for me. Factoring in that she had almost no way of dealing with what must have been an unimaginable amount of sexual frustration, and that she seemed to let the data in her head do whatever it wanted, it was entirely likely that things like that would crop up from time to time and just cycle around within her brain. Unless that image had been just one of many.

I toyed briefly with the idea of looking to see, but decided that I didn't want to know.

The Prime Minister sighed softly and shifted in her sleep; a subconscious reaction to my intrusion. I'd disturbed my sense of harmony with her cyberbrain patterns by touching and reacting to that file – if I stayed in her head much longer, she was going to wake up. I quickly withdrew into my own cyberbrain, severed the connection, and left the room, closing the door quietly behind me.

And yet, as I walked down the hallway to my own room, the set of thoughts that _I'd_ been trying to repress for the last few hours started creeping to the forefront of my mind again. Conflict of professional interest aside, the Prime Minister was reasonably attractive, and she was the sort of woman who'd probably shut up and do what I told her without really thinking about it. While, in my vast experience, most Japanese women weren't anything terribly exciting….if no one else was available, and I was bored, and she'd made it very clear that she wanted me?

It wasn't entirely out of the question.

I shook my head. I needed to sleep, and quickly – I was getting confused again.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and started to peel off my body armor, leaving it in a heap on the floor – I'd pick it up in the morning. As I did this, I opened up a cybercomm channel.

_Batou – how's everything?_

_I'm on my way back to Niihama now, with your car. It's safe and sound; there wasn't any trouble back up at your place._

_Thanks a lot. Hey, when he comes in, let the chief know that I'm going to be offline for the next few hours. If I don't start catching up on my sleep soon, it'll be bad._

_Sure thing._

_Great. I'll report in when I wake up again._

_Gotcha - I'll be waiting. Sweet dreams._

I cut the channel and finished undressing. I felt a momentary pang of guilt for leaving myself so vulnerable, given the situation, but the evening's events had proven that being tired made me do stupid things, and if six hours of downtime could keep the Prime Minister from being shot again sometime in the near future, it was well worth it.

The image I'd found in her cyberbrain flickered to the forefront of my mind again. I deleted it; I thought I'd done that earlier, but apparently not. At any rate, it wasn't anything to concern myself with.

I crawled into bed and fell asleep at once.

The sun had almost risen when I opened my eyes again. I wasn't fully recovered – after what I'd done to myself over the last two weeks, I was going to need a good long rest when all of this was over to get back up to my full potential. Still, my head was much clearer now, and most importantly, my brain was no longer threatening to shut itself down.

Once I was dressed, I went to go check on the Prime Minister. She was still sound asleep, curled up on the far side of the bed. It looked like she'd gotten up at some point in the night, though – the blinds were closed.

I made my way through the apartment to the room off the front hallway where my spare bodies were stored and, after I'd made sure the place was perfectly secure, switched into a less conspicuous model and went out for supplies. I had a sidearm tucked into my jacket pocket just in case, but that was mostly out of habit; nobody looked twice at a teenage girl out running errands.

By the time I got back, the Prime Minister was awake; she'd wandered out into my living area, presumably looking for me.

"Good morning," I said matter-of-factly, packing away the groceries I'd bought. "It's nice to see that you're walking, at least."

She blinked confusedly at me for a moment, and I couldn't help but laugh.

"….Major Kusanagi?"

I stuck my tongue out.

"Of course. You didn't think I was going to go outside in _that_ body right now, did you? It's on file, after all."

More blinking. I sighed.

"Go eat – you need to keep your strength up so you can heal properly. I'm going to go find you something to wear."

She nodded slowly. "Right. Thank you…"

I shrugged, then went off to switch back to my main body. I briefly considered staying in this one for a while longer, just to mess with her, but now probably wasn't the proper time.

It was then that I realized that I was supposed to have contacted headquarters when I woke up. I opened a channel immediately.

_Good morning – sorry for the delay._

_Major? It's about time. What's your situation?_

It was the chief.

_Safe and sound. And you? Usually you don't answer messages unless I send them to you directly._

_Everyone else is either gone to ground or undercover trying to sort out this mess._

_Developments, I take it?_

_That's one way of putting it._

_What's going on?_

_The relevant authorities are trying to proceed with this affair as if it was indeed a hostage case. They're being spurred on by the Home Affairs Minister – he's insisting that the initial security breach a month ago was all part of a disguised plot by Section 9 to get to the Prime Minister._

_So he engineered this whole thing just to get us on the government's bad side again?_

_So it would seem. Your actions last night didn't exactly help our cause, either – generally, innocent people don't run, let alone incapacitate an entire GSDF team._

_I tried to talk to them; they acted like they were under orders to disregard anything I said. And I sure as hell wasn't going to release the Prime Minister into their custody without verifying the situation._

_I know, and under the circumstances you probably did the right thing – it may very well have been Maekawa's intention to have his team kill the Prime Minister and then accuse Section 9 of the act._

That would explain why at least one of the soldiers had been equipped with that nine millimeter handgun – Seburo ammunition was distinctive, and we were the only government agency that used it.

_So, what do we do?_

_Well, at this point, the only one who can put an end to this is the Prime Minister herself. I'm in the process of organizing an escort for her back to Fukuoka – for now, I want you to stay put until I contact you with the finalized plans._

_Why? I can take her back right now, if you'd like._

_No – Maekawa probably has his own reception planned. I'd rather wait until we can properly assess the situation and act accordingly._

_Understood._

_And if you're attacked again, whatever you do, don't retaliate. That's the last thing we need right now._

_I'll try._

_Good. Your top priority is to keep the Prime Minister safe; remember that._

_Just like it's been for the last month. Got it._

I closed the link.

So, the attempt on the Prime Minister's life had just been part of a plot to disgrace Section 9 – even my habitual paranoia hadn't led me to expect anything like that. I was slipping.

The more I thought about it, though, the more sense it made. Of course the Prime Minister would go to Section 9 if she thought someone was out to get her, and of course Section 9 would assign someone to tail her full-time. The incident with Mari had probably been a test just to verify that someone was there, and then I'd played right into the whole scheme by removing the Prime Minister from the premises altogether, allowing Maekawa and his conspirators to claim that I'd forced her consent. The way we'd all been duped was actually rather impressive.

Still, the man was going to an awful lot of trouble just to settle a score with a public security department.

I sighed and wandered into my closet. The Prime Minister would have to borrow my clothes for the time being, which could present some problems; almost everything I had that stood a chance of actually fitting her was rather revealing, and while I didn't have a problem with that, I was fairly sure that she would.

Several minutes of rummaging produced some short-sleeved shirts and a couple of pairs of neutral-colored leggings that I hadn't worn in ages – nothing particularly presentable, but it wasn't like she'd be going anywhere. I folded everything over my arm, stopped in to the guest bedroom to lay it out on the bed, and then headed back into the kitchen/living room area. The Prime Minister was cleaning up; she turned around when she heard me coming.

Now that I was back in the body she was used to, I couldn't help but wonder what she was thinking about when she looked at me. I needed to push all of that to the back of my mind, or things would get very awkward very quickly.

"I turned up some clothes for you," I said tonelessly. "I put them in your room."

She nodded.

"Oh, and I talked to the chief just a little while ago – we're staying put here until he can make arrangements to get you back to Fukuoka to straighten everything out, so make yourself comfortable in the meantime."

She nodded again. "I take it, then, that your team has discovered who sent the GSDF unit after me last night?"

I suddenly remembered that I hadn't told her anything about our now-confirmed suspicions surrounding Maekawa. I took a deep breath.

"It was the Home Affairs Minister – he called in a favor from the Department of Defense, from what we understand. In fact, he was the one at the back of the initial bug found in your security staff's shared memory, and then later the hacking of Mari's cyberbrain. It seems as though he's trying to make it look like this was all a plot by Section 9 to assassinate you."

The Prime Minister's eyes grew very wide.

"Then…last night…" she said slowly, shakily, "when…"

She looked down at the thick bandage around her calf. I nodded.

"The bullet was fired from a Seburo M-5 semiautomatic, which Section 9 uses exclusively. It's likely that if I'd stood down and let the GSDF team take custody of you, they would have killed you on the spot and then reported that I'd done it."

Her hands flew to her mouth, and she inhaled sharply. "But…why?"

"To take Section 9 out of commission, probably," I said. "It seems excessive to me, but we can't think of any other motive he may have had."

The Prime Minister was quiet for a long moment. She leaned back against the counter and looked down at the floor.

"Everything is still under control, Prime Minister," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "Once we can get you back to your offices to explain the situation, we can take Maekawa into custody and end this. Right now, the only people who know where you are are me and the chief, and believe it or not, this is nothing we weren't prepared for, even if we weren't actually expecting it."

She let out an uneasy sigh and nodded.

"I'll be around if you need me for anything," I said, and then I turned around and headed for my own dive equipment to see if I could get any information on what Maekawa's people were doing, and to wait for notification from the chief that it was safe to move out.

The day dragged on sluggishly, with absolutely no word from the chief or anybody else; I wished he'd given me a deadline, so that if I hadn't heard from him I'd know to call and ask what was going on. On the positive side, however, there hadn't been any visitors. From the information I'd been able to turn up, it looked like Maekawa had one of the other public security sections under his jurisdiction trying to dig up our location by searching for my name and appearance in property tax records.

I felt rather affronted that they underestimated me to such an extent, but I supposed in the end it was something to be thankful for.

I went out to check on the Prime Minister twice during the day, and both times I found her sitting in the living room, staring off into space with dull eyes. She had at least bothered to clean herself up and get dressed, so I assumed she was still working everything out in her own mind and left her alone. When I came out a third time, later that evening, I discovered that she'd already gone to bed.

The investigation team I'd been listening in on was no closer to pinpointing our location, and when the chief contacted me it'd be by cyberbrain; I decided to stay in the living room for the time being and maybe catch up on a little more of my sleep while I had the time. I sat down on the sofa and made myself comfortable.

I'd been dozing for about half an hour when I suddenly became aware of a soft noise, vaguely reminiscent of choking. It was coming from the Prime Minister's room.

I got up at once and moved swiftly down the hallway.

The noise grew louder and sounded slightly less like asphyxiation the closer I got to the door. Once I was there, I knocked, and then, when there was no response, pushed the door open.

"Prime Minister?"

She was hunched over on the far side of the bed, making inarticulate sounds in between short, piercing breaths - a panic attack. I called up the police training I'd gone through all those years ago when making the transition from defense to public security; the human interaction parts of it had never really been my strong suit, and as such I'd usually relegated them to somebody else on the scene. Unfortunately, I was the only other one here, so I'd have to deal with this myself. I sat down next to her.

"Prime Minister."

She didn't answer, and her breathing became harsher and more erratic. I placed my hand on her shoulder.

"Prime Minister, everything's all right. Calm down."

No response.

"_Yoko_," I said sharply.

Her face jerked upward at once. Her lips were parted, and her eyes were wide and rimmed with red; it looked like she'd been crying.

"Are you all right?"

She looked down at the floor.

"I…yes, I'm…."

She started to hyperventilate again, and I sat there, still with my hand on her shoulder, trying to figure out what the most effective method of calming her down would be before she passed out. My brain had it for me in only a few milliseconds.

I sighed; to hell with being awkward.

I pulled her forward and set my arms firmly around her back, pressing her chest against mine and limiting the space her lungs had to expand. Her fingers tightened on my shoulders, and at the same time I felt her respiration and heart rate begin to settle.

"Good," I said. "Keep breathing."

It took several minutes more for her to come down from her emotional fit, and I didn't let go of her until her breathing had stabilized. Finally her grip on my shoulders loosened, although she still didn't want to look up at me.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. "It's rather embarrassing to have you see me like this…"

Of course, her first reaction was to apologize.

"It's all right," I said. "After everything you've been through in the last couple of days, I'd say you're entitled to an anxiety attack."

She made an odd hiccupping noise that might have been an attempt at a laugh.

"It's just…frustrating…" she said slowly.

"Hmm?"

"Well…after all of this…to find out that I wasn't even being targeted on my own merits….That I was perfectly disposable if it meant that one man could displace an organization with whose function he happened to disagree."

I stared at her for a moment.

"So you're saying that you'd rather have someone after your life who thought that _you_ were a threat that needed to be removed?"

"Wouldn't you? If someone over whom you had direct jurisdiction was going to have you killed, wouldn't you at least like them to think you held some significance yourself, instead of just being a pawn to use and throw aside when it had served its purpose?"

"I suppose," I said, after a moment of consideration. "Still…that's kind of an odd way to look at it, if you don't mind me saying so."

"I know," she said. "But you've seen me – I don't have a life outside of my occupation. For someone to decide that I'm unimportant enough to be sacrificed for the sake of their own petty plot…It's basically saying that everything I've done, everything I've worked for, hasn't got a single ounce of meaning to it." She let out a heavy sigh. "If someone's going to kill me…I'd rather it be just between me and them."

What an extraordinarily strange woman.

She looked up at me, and I could see the rebellion in the gentle brown of her eyes; a powerful desire to stand above a system that intended to use her for what it could and then destroy her.

It was intensely attractive.

"Say my name again," she said, in barely more than a whisper. Her voice was shaking ever so slightly.

I raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Because," she said, "I'd rather you weren't thinking of me as the Prime Minister of Japan right now."

I liked her this way best of all, I thought, when she would have been an unpresentable mess if not for those _eyes_.

"Yoko," I murmured. A dull blush crept into her cheeks, and she started forward only to freeze up again. Her lips were parted softly, teeth biting back a request that, for all her force and frustration, she was still too shy to make of me.

That was what finally did it. I needed her.

Slowly, my hand trailed over her shoulder, up the length of her smooth, slender neck to rest lightly on her cheek. She'd asked me not to think of her as the Prime Minister of Japan, so I didn't. It wasn't the Prime Minister who tilted her head back and closed her eyes, sucking in a deep breath between her teeth; it wasn't the Prime Minister whose fingers tightened in the fabric of my shirt, and it most certainly was not the Prime Minister whose lips softened eagerly as I touched my own to them.

I'd meant to pull away after a few seconds, but she was fully pressed against me now, and the warmth and life of her body was too much to resist: I needed _all_ of her. With the hand that wasn't by this time tangled firmly in her hair, I reached around and drew out a cable from my cyberbrain, then felt my way along her neck until I found a port to which to connect it. She met the link with a questioning uncertainty that I understood at once; I drew back from her physically, bringing my hand up to her cheek again.

"It's all right," I breathed, guiding her head forward to rest against my shoulder, patiently running one hand up and down her back. She let out a deep, shuddering breath, and slowly, very slowly, the pressure from her barrier decreased, until I was free to move wherever I wanted inside her head.

This was going to be different, I could tell that much – I had never held someone physically while making love to them electronically, and I was curious as to how it would affect the data being exchanged. Also, she hadn't integrated her sense of self with her cyberbrain enough for me to project a full-on virtual image the way I normally would have, not that that was essential; as long as I could get into her sensory data, I could accomplish roughly the same thing. I found what appeared to be the appropriate subsystem and patched into it, then ran the data through my own cyberbrain and projected it onto my body, at which point I was immediately assailed by what was absolutely the worst case of nerves I'd ever felt in my life.

Of course – the way her cyberbrain was structured, the different types of data were barely differentiated between. I couldn't just filter out one type or another; they were inextricably linked. If I wanted her sensory data, I would have to take the emotional fluctuations as well.

Her pulse beat strongly against the inside of my chest. I shivered, feeling at the same time like my blood was about to burn through my skin - this was going to be _very_ different.

It might have been because I was actually sharing her head at the moment, but I was starting to understand the sensation of intimacy she connected with a direct link; for someone like her, who found it difficult to keep information separate from emotion, it _was_ intimate. I had done this my whole life without even thinking about it, but…I was inside someone else's mind right now. At that moment, our two separate bodies were merely extensions of the same combined consciousness.

The emotional high this realization produced was unlike anything I'd ever felt before.

Still adapting to the trembling and the wild heartbeat, which were completely alien to me, I began manipulating the sensory data from her cyberbrain, touching and adjusting as I needed to, and occasionally sending her brief images I'd created in my own mind of what her brain thought I was doing with her body. At the same time, I traced the curve of her neck with my lips, drinking in the delicate nervous sensations it produced. I would have been satisfied with her emotions alone – the feeling of _connection_ was heavenly.

I pushed further, deepening the link, meeting no resistance whatsoever. Between the two of us, it was getting harder to think clearly; I felt myself going completely limp in my own arms, against my own unnaturally solid body that seemed to hum with energy, and then I felt myself very cautiously lowering that same body, now small and delicate, down onto its side, settling myself next to it with one arm resting gently on the curve of its waist. Now that I no longer had to worry about supporting myself, I left my own body behind entirely, letting everything fade to a blinding white of intermingled need and emotion.


	7. Chapter 7

It had started to rain again; the noise of it was everywhere, and the droplets that slid down the windows cast odd shadows as the lights from the city filtered through them.

The Prime Minister lay on her back, gazing up at the ceiling with an expression that suggested she was somewhere else entirely; somewhere very, very pleasant. She was practically glowing, even in the dim light from outside, and her breasts rose and sank smoothly in time with her soft, even breathing.

I sat on the bed next to her with my back against the wall, looking out at the rain-blurred cityscape without really seeing it. Usually at this point in the proceedings I was long gone, but leaving her, especially when I'd just be going to sit in some other room of the apartment, had seemed heartless, so here I was.

I couldn't decide which was worse – the fact that I'd gone to bed with the Prime Minister of Japan in the first place, or the fact that I'd actually enjoyed it on a level beyond mere physical pleasure.

I also felt perfectly justified in saying that, at this moment, 'awkward' was an enormous understatement.

Still, there was nothing to do, really, but sit there and wait for her to fall asleep, so that was what I did. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, seemed perfectly content to lie awake and stare at the ceiling all night.

"You're so quiet," I said at last, when her stillness had gotten to the point where I was slightly concerned. She sighed.

"My husband used to say the same thing," she said. She turned her head to look at me. "I feel like I've gone out of my head, to be honest."

"Probably not a bad place for you to be," I said. She laughed.

I needed to stop talking. Talking to a woman in this sort of setting generally implied that one actually cared about her, which was most certainly not the case here.

And yet only half an hour ago, I'd been all too eager to use her for the emotional high her pent-up affection produced.

Why the hell hadn't I thought about how complicated this would become? It wasn't at all like me.

I should have left. Should have made it clear to her that none of this meant anything to me. She'd never confront me about it, anyway.

There was still plenty of time to leave, to just _end_ whatever had even begun.

My body refused to move.

It wasn't even like the Prime Minister was making this difficult by being overly clingy or anything like that, which seemed odd to me, considering how she'd been just a little while ago. It was as if all of her fear and frustration had evaporated, and now the only thing that was left was a kind of blank state of peace.

Although for all I knew, it was normal for her to treat sex like a full-on religious experience. Given how she reacted to a simple data link, it wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest.

After several more minutes of silence, she turned so she was facing me.

"I just had an idea."

"Hmm?"

"It's going to sound wild and impulsive."

I very much doubted that; after this, nothing the Prime Minister did would seem wild and impulsive to me ever again.

"What is it?"

She took a deep breath.

"Let's go pay a visit to the Minister of Home Affairs."

"…Right now?"

She nodded. I waited a moment before answering.

"I wouldn't advise it. He's probably used his connections in the Department of Defense to set up a blockade, and also, in case you've forgotten, you're still injured."

"It's feeling much better than it did last night. And I'm not worried; I'll have you with me, after all."

"I'm kind of the reason you're injured in the first place – shouldn't you be worried?"

She sat up, leaning forward slightly.

"You're also the reason I'm alive right now," she said, her voice soft and low. "More than a few times over."

I had a sudden, powerful urge to pull her close to me and kiss her again.

Maybe that was why I'd stayed, because I was hoping for an opportunity to link with her again.

How was she able to act like none of this had happened when I kept replaying the whole damn thing in my head? Shouldn't it have been the other way around?

The Prime Minister watched me expectantly, waiting. I sighed.

"All right. Suit up, and then we'll go get my car and head out."

There was little to no traffic on the road, due to the late hour, so it was barely any time at all before I was guiding the car off the exit ramp and onto the highway, away from Niihama and around the wide loop that would eventually bring me to Fukuoka. It would have been faster to fly, of course, but as Section 9 was currently on lockdown and I wasn't about to even consider attempting to sneak the Prime Minister onto a commercial flight, driving was much safer.

Instead of actually calling and getting an earful about recklessness and disobeying direct orders, I'd sent a quick note to the chief explaining myself before we'd left. It had come down to the fact that I was under orders from someone who was his direct superior (which I was), so there wasn't much I could do, and I was still taking every precaution. At any rate, as an independent contractor, the worst penalty I might incur for this would be not receiving another contract from Section 9, which I knew wasn't going to happen.

The Prime Minister was in the seat next to me, back in camouflage for the second night in a row, this time wearing a spare set of my body armor as well. It fit her better than I'd thought it would; although she was rather smaller than I was, proportionally, I was narrower, so it balanced out well enough. And of course she'd been able to zip the jacket all the way up to her chin, something I'd never quite managed.

Holstered underneath the Prime Minister's jacket was a Seburo M-5 semiautomatic, a twin to the pistol that hung from my belt, although I'd told her that she wasn't to use it unless it was a dire emergency and she was absolutely certain she'd be able to fire. Not wanting a repeat of the previous night's events, I was going in armed to the teeth this time; in addition to the handgun, my C-26A assault rifle lay in the back seat of the car, and I'd packed plenty of ammunition for both, along with a few stun grenades for good measure. Still, I was fairly sure that I wouldn't have to resort to such tactics; I was running someone who could cloak herself into a building she had full clearance to access. Easy.

The tricky part would be getting near the building in the first place.

"So," said the Prime Minister, tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear, "exactly what sort of reception can we expect?"

"Probably some form of roadblock around Fukuoka," I said, "and then after that, I can't be sure. Since it would be too time-consuming, not to mention conspicuous, to check every car coming into Fukuoka, that particular barrier will most likely be digital, and we'll be able to breeze right past – this car throws out a false registration ID if it's scanned. However, I'm willing to bet that Maekawa will have actual troops waiting for us when we get closer in."

"Oh," said the Prime Minister, and she smoothed her hair back again.

"Don't worry," I said. "He's probably banking on you trying to get back to your own offices, not his. And if we run into trouble, just turn your camo on and sit tight." I turned my head slightly, giving her a shadow of a smile. "You won't get shot again, I can promise that much."

She froze momentarily, and then nodded eagerly, her eyes narrowing in a silent laugh. I was entirely beyond even _trying_ to ignore just how good she looked, with the camouflage tight around her body, her hair back in a messy ponytail, and now that momentary expression of exhilarated glee. Part of my mind was honestly still reeling from the fact that I'd slept with her, but the best I could do was just store everything away for later. There would be a time and place for it once this was all over; right now, I had a job to do.

We came within sight of Fukuoka just as the horizon was beginning to lighten, and as I'd expected, at least three choppers, each a dull military gray-green, were circling the airspace. My car's onboard computer chimed an alert, telling me that its registration had been requested and successfully authenticated.

"There's level one cleared," I said, slowing the car slightly; the last thing I needed was to get pulled over for speeding with no valid form of identification that would excuse me.

I turned off the highway at the appropriate exit, and another half-hour's maneuvering through still sparsely populated city streets brought us to the building that housed the offices of the Home Affairs Ministry. I circled the block once; aside from the usual security and the new installations at the front gate, it seemed fairly quiet. Once I was positive that no one was paying any attention to us, I parked the car in an open lot across the street.

"Okay – you ready to get this over with?"

"I take it you've already got a plan to get past the security, then?" said the Prime Minister.

I nodded. "It's fairly simple; we go right in through the front gate."

The Prime Minister's mouth opened slightly, as if to question me, but she thought better of it.

"I'm going to project a mask that will effectively prevent us from being detected by a cyberbrain," I continued. "However, I'll have to stay linked with you for both of us to be protected – otherwise you won't be able to see or hear me either." I turned my head slowly to look at her. "Are you going to be all right with that?"

She nodded, although I could see the faintest trace of a blush in her cheeks.

"This would also be an excellent opportunity to practice keeping your thoughts to _yourself_."

She was blushing in earnest now, and I had to laugh. From the expression on her face, it was obvious that she wasn't the slightest bit amused; I supposed I should have known better than to tease her like that just yet. I sighed.

"Well, there's no sense in waiting around. Let's go."

I strapped my C-26A across my back, then linked up with the Prime Minister. The brief sensation of discomfort I'd come to associate with establishing a connection with her cyberbrain was noticeably absent – I filed that away with the things I'd think over later, once I was back home and all of this was behind me.

_Activating mask array._

A display flashed into my field of vision, testing and re-testing the mask functions before giving me an all clear. I reset the parameters to detect the Prime Minister's body as an extension of my own, and waited for the system to reconfigure itself.

_Mask array active and fully functioning. If you need to say anything to me, Prime Minister, use your cybercomm._

_Understood._

_All right. Here we go._

I took hold of her wrist, and we moved quickly across the street, up to the gate. Two soldiers stood on each side, and when a car turned into the driveway, the man closest to the driver moved forward to ask for identification.

_Nice and easy, now._

Once the car had passed, I strode forward through the gate, with the Prime Minister clutching at my arm. Not one of the soldiers so much as batted an eye.

_This seems almost too simple._

The Prime Minister's shaky relief came through even in the cybercomm transmission – I was still getting some bleed-over from her emotions, but it was easier to shut out now that I knew what to expect. I squeezed her wrist gently.

_See what happens when I finally make some time to sleep?_

_Indeed. I'll have to talk to Chief Aramaki about your pay scale – I'd hate to think how much this is going to cost the taxpayers now that you're actually fully capable of doing what you were contracted to do._

So maybe some teasing was allowed.

The front door of the building was being monitored both by members of the security team and a receptionist, all of whom would most certainly have noticed the door opening seemingly of its own accord, so we circled around to a staff entrance and snuck quickly inside. From there I was able to call up the floor plans and chart the quickest route to the office of the Home Affairs Minister.

_Let's just hope he comes into the office early._

Sure enough, as we rounded the corner into the hallway that led to Maekawa's office, the light was on and the door was ajar. I could see him at his desk, with his eyes closed and his brow furrowed in concentration. He was mid-transmission, and after a moment of fumbling I was able work around the encryption and listen in.

_For the last time, I am not going to accept 'disappeared' as an answer. We are dealing with one of our own agencies, which I know for a fact has neither the resources nor the talent to simply make someone __**vanish**_.

_I'm sorry sir, but…we've run surveillance scans up and down the country, and our target is nowhere to be found. Plus, every member of Section 9 has been accounted for._

_Even the woman who was tailing the Prime Minister for the last month?_

_About that, sir…you were certain you heard the Prime Minister address her as 'Major Kusanagi'?_

_Yes, why?_

_The only relevant record we were able to turn up was for a Major Motoko Kusanagi, employed by Section 9 until 2030, when she was killed in the line of duty. Brain death due to head trauma inflicted by a sniper._

I sensed the Prime Minister turning questioningly towards me, and I shrugged.

_I had to disappear somehow when I retired – reworking existing records just seemed like the easiest way to do it._

She nodded. Maekawa, meanwhile, was resting his forehead against his hands.

_But there has to be…no, never mind. It doesn't matter who takes the fall for this – pick someone off the team, list them as unaccounted for, and when the Prime Minister's__body turns__up, I want them having pulled the trigger._

_…Yes, sir._

_And don't call me again until you have good news._

_Understood._

The transmission ended. I turned to the Prime Minister.

_Well?_

_Un-mask me, or…whatever. I'm going to go in for a chat – you cover me._

I could feel her anger seething through the data link.

_Yes, ma'am._

I disconnected from the Prime Minister's cyberbrain, and she shimmered back into the visible spectrum, striding purposefully across the wide hallway to the office door. Pulling my handgun from its holster, I followed close behind her, still completely invisible. She raised her hand and knocked sharply on the door.

There was a scuffle of movement, of drawers being opened and shut and papers being rearranged, and then Maekawa's voice.

"Come in."

The Prime Minister pushed the door open and stepped into the office, her eyes fixed on the Minister of Home Affairs, who sat stock still, an expression of extreme distaste twisting his features.

"_Well_," said the Prime Minister, folding her arms across her chest. "I suppose I've saved you the trouble of trying to find me – now it's just a matter of calling your people up here to finish the job, and your plan will have come to fruition."

He did try to go for it, but not quickly enough; the moment I saw his hand twitch toward the console on his desk, I fired three warning shots into the plaster an inch to the left of his head. He raised both hands shakily into the air.

"It's unlikely that you'll live long after being sentenced for this offense," continued the Prime Minister -the smirk in her voice was absolutely delightful to listen to—"but I will tell you that my desire for some form of explanation for all of this is one of the only things keeping me from having you killed right now."

The Minister's eyes were scanning the room desperately, trying to pick out where I was, his hands still trembling above his head.

"This…This is _exactly_ why I wanted to decommission Section 9 altogether," he spat angrily. "You've become corrupted yourself, Prime Minister, thinking you can threaten people with your own secret police force!"

The Prime Minister laughed quietly. "It seems to me that this is the sort of situation which proves the exact usefulness of an organization such as Section 9. After all, you've tried to assassinate me by means of my security team, the self-defense forces for whom I act as commander-in-chief, and even my personal assistant – from where I stand, having another line of defense to fall back on seems like a terrific idea."

"That sort of paranoid thinking is what led to the formation of that death squad in the first place!" said the Minister of Home Affairs; it seemed to still be sinking in that he'd lost this round, and badly. "You have to understand that as long as it exists, people are going to be suspicious of your motives for keeping it intact! And-" he drew himself up as best he could "-I can show you a whole host of people who agree with me."

"I can't imagine you'll find too many people willing to back you up once you've been convicted of treason," said the Prime Minister coldly, "which, if I'm not mistaken, is still a hanging offense."

It finally hit home; the color drained from Maekawa's face.

At that moment, four police officers burst into the room, and I stepped out of the way.

_When did you-?_

_After we disconnected – I reactivated my GPS and sent out a distress signal. The security here would have picked it up first, although I expect my own team will arrive soon enough. Stay nearby, please._

_Of course._

I backed inconspicuously into a corner, my gun still at the ready.

"I'm all right," the Prime Minister was saying, waving away any concern that anyone should think about offering in her direction. "I want the Minister of Home Affairs placed under arrest, along with any recent additions to this building's security personnel."

And just like that, it was all over.

**-Two Days Later-**

"The actions of the Home Affairs Minister and his conspirators were shameful, and it is my most sincere hope that my administration can move forward from this point in honor and honesty. Thank you."

There was the usual flicker of camera flashes, and then a member of the audience stood.

"Madam, the statements made by the Home Affairs Ministry during the incident implicated Public Security Section 9 as the responsible party. Was this group involved in any way?"

"To the best of my knowledge, Section 9 was disbanded by my predecessor, and no such organization currently exists. Its name was chosen by the Minister of Home Affairs merely to serve as a convenient scapegoat."

The conference dissolved into the customary storm of questions, and after answering a few of them as politely as she could, the Prime Minister left the dais and disappeared behind the surrounding curtains. I cut the broadcast transmission and leaned back against the sofa, waiting.

It wasn't too long before the Prime Minister came through her office door, one hand to her forehead. I stood and bowed, and she jumped slightly as she noticed me.

"Oh…Major Kusanagi…I thought you'd've left already."

"I didn't think it would be right to leave without coming to see you first, ma'am," I said, determined to keep things as formal as possible.

"I appreciate it," she said, smiling warmly, still looking somewhat flustered. She set her notes down on her desk, and then walked over to where I was standing; as she moved, I happened to notice a square bandage taped to her calf, just visible under her stockings.

My fault.

She noticed me staring, and shook her head.

"There won't even be a scar once it finishes healing, and I can barely feel it at all now anyway."

"Still, I'm sorry, ma'am."

It was one of the few times in my life that I'd said something like that and actually meant it.

She stepped closer to me and took my hands in hers.

"I'm glad you came up to see me one last time," she said. "I wanted to thank you in person. For…everything."

She was looking up at me, and for a moment her eyes were those of the woman I'd held in the darkness, to whom I'd whispered the name _Yoko_ when she'd asked.

She blinked, and then she was the Prime Minister again.

"I was only doing my job, ma'am," I said. "And…there was something I wanted to give you."

"Oh?"

I reached into the pocket of my skirt and removed a folded piece of paper, which I handed to the Prime Minister.

"You told the former Minister of Home Affairs that you kept Section 9 around because it served as a line of defense for you when you had no one else to turn to. Although I have faith in the continued integrity of the organization as long as my former teammates are still a part of it…if that line should ever break on you as well, you'll always be able to contact me through those instructions."

The Prime Minister's mouth opened slightly.

"I…thank you."

"Hopefully you'll have a good long stretch of quiet after all of this, at least."

"Right," said the Prime Minister thoughtfully. "So, should I save this for emergencies, or…?"

I smiled. "Well, let's just say that if you have a job for me, I'm not likely to turn you down. Speaking of which, I should be on my way."

"I see," she said quietly. "Take care of yourself."

"Likewise."

I bowed shortly, and left the office.

As I walked out to my car, a fierce battle roiled in my mind of things I should have said versus things I was better off leaving unspoken, and where exactly the line between them fell.

Momentary lapses in decorum aside, she was still the Prime Minister of Japan, and, from time to time, my direct superior. The conflict of interest was astronomical to consider.

It was easier like this.

With a heavy sigh, I got into the car and drove away.

(A/N: The end, yay! I've actually been working on this story for over a year, so I can't express how relieved I am to finally have finished writing it :P Review and let me know what you thought, especially if you'd like to see more of this pairing from me, because I've got a few more ideas floating around the back of my head for them.)


End file.
